A Brief History
On January 30, 1925, Douglas Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon. Engineer, inventor, and computer pioneer, Engelbart would make our lives easier by inventing the computer mouse, patented in 1970.
Digging Deeper
Engelbart was educated at Oregon State University and the University of California at Berkely and went on to his life’s work of improving human–computer interaction, creating user friendly ways of using computers and the internet.
Engelbart founded the Doug Engelbart Institute and received numerous honors and awards, including the National Medal of Technology, the U.S.’s highest technology award. Incredibly, his employers at Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas failed to appreciate his innovative ideas and he retired in 1986 to found his institute
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford University Press, 2000.
Newkey-Burden, Chas. 64 Geeks: The Brains Who Shaped Our World. Ilex Press, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Jordiipa of a replica of Douglas Engelbart’s prototype mouse, ca. 1964, at the Computer History Museum, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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