little late
Douglas C. Engelbart, who passed away last week, wasn't a household name. If anything, he will be remembered as the creator of the mouse, the ubiquitous pointing device that is attached to nearly every desktop machine and a large number of laptops. But his contributions were a lot larger than that; indeed, working at the Standard Research Institute (now SRI International) in the late 1960s and 70s, he invented many of the little things that help define computing as we know
Engelbart joined SRI in Menlo Park, California in 1957 and in the 1960s he established a group called the Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Air Force. There, with the help of a small team, he incubated a host of ideas about how computing could work, including inventing an early prototype of what would become the mouse in 1964 after attending a computer graphics conference. He and mechanical engineer William English then built a working prototype, a wooden box on metal wheels, which at first had three buttons. (For years, Engelbart believed that more buttons would be better.)
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/computing/313394-remembering-doug-engelbart
Douglas C. Engelbart, who passed away last week, wasn't a household name. If anything, he will be remembered as the creator of the mouse, the ubiquitous pointing device that is attached to nearly every desktop machine and a large number of laptops. But his contributions were a lot larger than that; indeed, working at the Standard Research Institute (now SRI International) in the late 1960s and 70s, he invented many of the little things that help define computing as we know
Engelbart joined SRI in Menlo Park, California in 1957 and in the 1960s he established a group called the Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Air Force. There, with the help of a small team, he incubated a host of ideas about how computing could work, including inventing an early prototype of what would become the mouse in 1964 after attending a computer graphics conference. He and mechanical engineer William English then built a working prototype, a wooden box on metal wheels, which at first had three buttons. (For years, Engelbart believed that more buttons would be better.)
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/computing/313394-remembering-doug-engelbart
