Douglas Engelbart, father of the mouse, dies at 88

He was 88. Engelbart had suffered from poor health and died peacefully in his sleep, his daughter, Christina, told friends in an email. Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas.

Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system."

He never received any royalties for the mouse, for instance, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple Computer. He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect.  SRI would later license the technology for $40,000 to Apple, which released the first commercial mouse with its Lisa computer in 1983.

By 2000, Engelbart had won prestigious accolades including the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award. At the same time, he wrestled with his fade into obscurity even as technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates built fortunes off of the personal computer and became celebrity billionaires by realizing some of his early ideas.

In 2005, he told Tom Foremski, a technology journalist, that he felt the last two decades of his life had been a "failure" because he could not receive funding for his research or "engage anybody in a dialogue."

Respect the great scientist!!!

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