Douglas C. Engelbart

• Douglas C. Engelbart was a pioneer in the design of interactive computer environments best known for inventing the computer mouse in 1964.
• Sidenote: I would like to share you all this fascinating video on Apple's keyboard evolution. The arrow keys had come a long way. ;)

Apple Keyboard Evolution 1983-2015 Part 1

• Drafted into the U.S. Army as World War II came to close, the future inventor worked as a radar technician in the Philippines for two years before returning to Oregon State.
• Engelbart landed a position at California's Ames Research Center, a government aerospace laboratory run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (a precursor to NASA)90
• Engelbart began a career at the Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI International).
• Around this same time, he began focusing on an approach that he termed "bootstrapping" in which he asserted the fields of engineering and science would be greatly improved if computer power were shared among researchers.
• In the early 1960s, Engelbart founded SRI International's Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto in an effort to further research information processing and computer-sharing tools and methods.
• The primary developer of the oN-Line System, also known as NLS, a revolutionary computer-sharing system.
• In 1964, Engelbart conceptualized and created the first design for the computer mouse.
• The inventor went on to create the first two-dimensional editing system, and was the first to demonstrate the use of mixed text-graphics and shared-screen viewing.
• Engelbart served as director of the Augmentation Research Center from its inception until 1977. The center was transferred to Tymshare in 1978, with NLS being renamed "Augment. In 1989, Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Project at Stanford University.
• Sidenote: Tymshare, Inc. was a time-sharing service and third-party hardware maintenance company.

Douglas Engelbart | Wikiwand

• Section on guiding philosophy:

Engelbart's career was inspired in December 1950 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals other "than a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after".Over several months he reasoned that:

1. he would focus his career on making the world a better place
2. any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions.
3. if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems – the sooner the better