Douglas Carl Engelbart passed away peacefully yesterday after a long illness. He was 88.
Who was Doug Engelbart? Put it this way -- If ever you have used:
- A mouse,
- A windowing system,
- Video chat,
- A WYSIWYG word processor,
- Documents containing images as well as text,
- Documents with hyperlinks,
- Shared documents,
- Remote ("cloud") computing; or
- Interactive (as opposed to batch) computing of any kind,
Then you can thank Doug Engelbart for all of them, which he and his team developed and prototyped during his time at SRI International.
I am not qualified to even begin to write a eulogy for Engelbart; that is best left to others. But if you want to get the barest introduction to the man's work, here's a link to The Mother of All Demos, a spellbinding 100-minute video outlining what he had accomplished so far. Much of what you see will be familiar to the point of dull to you, so try to keep in mind this demo was recorded in 1968.
For a more in-depth view of his accomplishments, have a look through the Doug Engelbart Institute.