Doug Engelbart, goodbye to a giant computer science - Computer Point

Into It died at the age of 88 years, the inventor of Portland, that will be remembered for his contribution to human-machine. The mouse, hypertext, graphical user interfaces: concepts to look far into the future

Rome – At the age of 25 years, Douglas C. Engelbart was pierced by an epiphany that would forever change the course of computer science. About to get married – not at all satisfied with the classical work and family life – the young Englebart had read with great interest the writings of Vannevar Bush, a sort of call to arms to find new forms of sharing of human knowledge. In his epiphany, Englebart could be seen sitting in front of a large screen full of different symbols, probably a legacy of what has been studied in the Navy (Navy ) with the radar console. Englebart was sure of one thing: that screen would be able to organize and present information and communications station as a project and job .

88 years, one of the giants of Silicon Valley has been serenely off at his home in Atherton (California), as announced by his family and the institution that bears his name. From Here to Eternity, Doug Engelbart will be remembered as the inventor of the mouse, the little slider that represents the heart of the vision of the young scholar in Portland: to allow a form of more immediate interaction between human gestures and information stored and combined by computer machines, still too bulky for the revolution of personal computing .

With the vital contribution the computer engineer William Bill Inglese, l ‘ revolutionary invention of the mouse will be certainly not in monetary terms, but because it is extremely integrated perspectives cultivated by Engelbart. In the now famous mother of all demos ( the mother of all demos ) – December 1968 – the visionary Portland showed how new technologies were entrenched in the daily life of man. By sliding the mouse videoconferencing technologies, rising to the first principles of ‘ hypertext and hypermedia, and graphical interfaces. In a seminal paper of 1962, Engelbart had called her “writing machine”, a tool with which man could interact, a tool capable of enhancing human capabilities.

Mauro Old