Stanford Researcher Doug Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies

Doug Engelbart in 2008 at a Stanford event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the introduction of interactive computing. (Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)

Doug Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse as an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute, died last week. He was 88.

(Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)

Engelbart died Tuesday at his home in Atherton, Calif., his family said.

Engelbart, who lectured at Stanford in the 1990s, was known as a visionary - a big-picture thinker who also knew the technical details.

In 1968, he wowed the worlds leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, where he showed off the pioneering work he and his colleagues were doing at the institute, now called SRI International.

He got a standing ovation for the presentation, often called the mother of all demos. In it, he introduced the mouse, hyperlinks, live text editing and interactive computing.

When Engelbart got his own lab at SRI in 1963, computers were mainframes, programmed with stacks of paper punch cards.

The idea for the mouse came in the early 1960s when Engelbarts lab, the Augmentation Research Center, held a NASA contract to develop a better way to select items on a computer display screen.

The light pen and joystick had already been invented but didnt work well. The team looked for new ideas.

Engelbart showed William English, SRIs chief engineer, an idea he sketched in his pocket notebook. It was essentially a joystick turned upside down. That was expanded into the mouse.

Engelbarts pocket notebook is among the items in the Douglas C. Engelbart Collection in the Department of Special Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. The collection also includes videotapes and computer tape backups spanning Engelbarts career from 1959 to the late 1980s.

The total collection comprises some 107 boxes of materials.

Doug was a giant who made the world a much better place and who deeply touched those of us who knew him, said Curtis R. Carlson, president and CEO of SRI. We will miss his genius, warmth and charm. Dougs legacy is immense - anyone in the world who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to him.

SRI was founded by Stanford University as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946. It became independent of the university in 1970. Based in Menlo Park, it is a nonprofit institute conducting contract research and development for government agencies, businesses and foundations.

Engelbart was honored with many prestigious awards over his career, including the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the most lucrative award for American inventors. He also received the National Medal of Technology from former President Bill Clinton for creating the foundations of personal computing.

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