Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American computer engineer whose work at Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center helped define modern personal computing. With lead engineer Bill English, he built the first computer mouse, applying for a patent in 1967 that described it as an X-Y position indicator for a display system and was granted in 1970; Engelbart later said the device earned its nickname because the cable trailing from it resembled a mouse's tail. On December 9, 1968, he presented a 90-minute live demonstration later nicknamed the Mother of All Demos, unveiling a working system, called NLS, that combined a bitmapped display, hypertext linking, video conferencing, real-time collaborative editing and a chorded keyboard years before any of these became commercially available. He received the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award in 1997, the National Medal of Technology in 2000, and the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal in 2001.