Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor whose research at the Stanford Research Institute laid much of the groundwork for how people interact with computers today. Engelbart invented the computer mouse as a pointing device in the mid-1960s, one part of a broader research program aimed at augmenting human intellect by making computers more directly useful as everyday collaborative tools rather than machines used only for large batch calculations. In December 1968 he presented a landmark public demonstration at a computing conference in San Francisco, later nicknamed the Mother of All Demos, in which he showed, for the first time together in one live system, the mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext links between documents, and real-time collaborative editing between people at different locations connected over a network, years before any of these became commonplace. Engelbart's NLS, or oN-Line System, developed by his research group through the 1960s, is considered a foundational precursor to the modern graphical, networked, collaborative computing environment, and his emphasis on using computers to help groups of people think and work together more effectively shaped much of the human-computer interaction research that followed.