Doug Engelbart dead at 88

[Steve - K4HX]

Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse passed away at the age of 88.  He was also a pioneer in computer networking and window based computer displays. His historic 1968 demo of some of these can be viewed at the link below.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

Watching that video makes me think of the quote ascribed to William Gibson.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."


Engelbart's passing is also symbolic in that the mouse may also soon pass with the ever increasing use of touch pads/screens and other gesture based computing.

[W3RSW]

Saw it on TV tonight. Orig mouse also shown. Big wood block with red push button switch.
Changed the world.

[K6JEK]

Jeff Rulifson, the sidekick in clip 17, and I worked together on and off for 15 years. At first it used to bug me that every time we discussed some new, great thing, he'd chime in "We did something like that back in ..."  that is until I figured out those jokers actually had done all that stuff when the rest of us were still punching cards. That 1968 Demo is known as the "Mother of all Demos" among computer people of a certain age.

[Steve - K4HX]

Indeed. Too few people know the names of people like Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Robert Metcalfe, Allen Turing, Vannevar Bush, etc. Instead they only know about people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. The contrast is striking to me.