Farewell to Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse - La Stampa

Into Who knows what he thought when Douglas Engelbart was fiddling with a tablet or a full touch smartphone. Or, rather, I wonder if we fumbled. The man who has gone down in the history of computing as the inventor of the mouse has died at age 88 due to kidney failure at his home in Atherton, California.

Into Born in Portland from a family of Scandinavian origin, after the Second World War decides his fate and graduated in Electronic Engineering, with a specialization continues and a PhD at Berkeley. In 1957 he was hired Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California and became responsible for the Arc, Augmentation Research Center, will present a workshop that 21 patents that bear his name.

Into It would be unfair to rem ember the great Engelbart only as the inventor of the mouse. The great visionary laid the foundations for the development of hypertext, computer networks and graphical interfaces. All achievements that today but that would not make news in the early sixties seemed a mere utopia.

Into The patent number 3,541,541 filed in 1967 and registered in 1970, described a technology for “control with the hand of a location marker on any surface that would manage a cursor on a CRT screen.” The original definition reread today shows just how complicated it was to find the right words to explain what Engelbart, along with William Inglese, and his colleagues had in mind.

Into According to an interview by Engelbart in 1987, the inspiration came observing a planimeter, an instrument used by engineers to measure the irregular geometric areas. The first computer mouse was made of wood, had three buttons and regulated the movement of the cursor through two perpendicular wheel s, only years later were replaced by wheels with a ball.

Into The sublimation of the value of Engelbart and his associates is all in a slide show of 9 December 1968, known to history as the mother of all demos (here the detailed description, the full video here). Engelbart in 90 minutes, in connection with its laboratories thanks to modem rudimentary, presented the ABC of modern computing.

Into The engineer spoke of man-machine interaction, video conferencing, the window interface, hypertext, using the wood mouse. Engelbart never knew how to give an explanation of why the vessel was called mouse, probably because it simply looked like a rat.

Into Yet, before the mouse went into production and was included in the packaging of a computer for personal use had to wait until 1980, fifteen years after the mother of all demos. In 2008, Logitech, the largest manufacturer of peripherals for PC, sold its billionth mouse, but Engelbart never received any royalties for his i nvention. Fortunately, in recent years, was awarded and honored with numerous awards.

its vital contribution to our lives everyday, Douglas Engelbart comes in its own merit in the Hall of Fame of the visionaries of science and technology: indeed he just wanted to “make the world a better place in which to live “and he succeeded.