Douglas Engelbart, best known
as the inventor of the
computer mouse, has died at
age 88. During his lifetime,
Engelbart made numerous
groundbreaking contributions
to the computing industry,
paving the way for
videoconferencing, hyperlinks,
text editing, and other
technologies we use daily.

The Computer History Museum
was first to report the news
via Twitter, and Stanford
Research Institute has since
confirmed Engelbart’s passing
to The Verge.
Perhaps the pioneer’s most
well-known moment came on
December 19th, 1968, when he
demonstrated the “mouse” —
an unheard of concept at the
time — before an audience at
Brooks Hall in San Francisco.
That presentation, commonly
referred to as “the mother of
all demos,” would serve as
inspiration for countless up
and coming technologists in
the earliest days of computing.
“We weren’t interested in
‘automation’ but in
‘augmentation,’” Engelbart
would say later. “We were not
just building a tool, we were
designing an entire system for
working with knowledge.”
Douglas Engelbart with the first
As it turned out, Engelbart
wasn’t a fan of his creation
being dubbed a “mouse.” In a
recent profile by The New
York Times, his daughter
Christina revealed it was
actually fellow researchers
that came up with the name.
“It was just what they called it
affectionately,” she said.
Engelbart referred to it as the
“X-Y position indicator for a
display system” but
unsurprisingly, the simpler
monicker proved more
popular.
President Bill Clinton honored
Douglas Engelbart with the
National Medal of Technology
and Innovation in 2000 — an
esteemed recognition of all
that Engelbart accomplished in
his lifetime. Specifically, the
medal recognizes Engelbart
“for creating the foundations
of personal computing
including continuous, real-time
interaction based on cathode-
ray tube displays and the
mouse, hypertext linking, text
editing, on-line journals,
shared-screen
teleconferencing, and remote
collaborative work.”
Christina Engelbart confirmed
her father’s death in a message
to professor David Farber’s
“classic computers” email list.
“His health had been
deteriorating of late, and took
turn for worse on the
weekend,” she wrote.

RIP to a herro