Douglas Engels, computer mouse inventor, computer expert died on July 2

Douglas Engelbart, the computer mouse inventor and computer expert, died on July 2 at the age of 88. Known as the "Father of the Mouse", Engelbart is a pioneer in email, word processing systems and Internet development.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., said on the 3rd that Engelbart’s daughter Christina informed her about the death of Engelbart. The Stanford Institute, which Engelbart had worked on, confirmed this message, and it is still unclear why it died.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the mainframe still occupied the mainstream position in the computer field. At that time, the punch card was used as a medium to input data into the computer. At that time, Engelbart had foreseen an era when people used computers to share information and solve problems.

Engelbart said that all his work is to "improve human intelligence." It comes down to making it easier for users to master and use computers. One of his greatest contributions was the computer mouse, which Engelbart invented in the 1960s and patented in 1970. The mouse at the time was a small wooden box with two metal rollers that were perpendicular to each other and named "Display System XY Position Indicator".

The idea of ​​using external tools to operate the inside of the computer is far ahead of that era. The computer mouse didn't come into commercial use until 1984, and Apple's Mac computer made the mouse popular.

In fact, Engelbart’s invention was so advanced that he and his colleagues did not derive much economic benefit from it. The mouse patent is only valid for 17 years and the technology entered the public domain in 1987. That means that when the mouse is widely used, Engelbart has been unable to use the patent to collect royalties.

Another important contribution of Engelbart is the “multi-window” system, which is the result of Engelbart’s joint efforts with his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute and his own laboratory. His lab also helped develop ARPANet, a government research network that spawned the Internet.

At a computer conference held in San Francisco in 1968, Engelbart shocked the entire industry. At home, he used a self-made data machine to use the laboratory's newly developed Internet system to remotely present his ideas to the audience in the venue. This is the first time that a mouse and video conference has appeared in the public and has been highly appreciated.

In 1997, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microelectronics, said: "Douglas is a pioneer in this field when network computer technology is not yet popular."

Even so, the gentle Engelbart is used to paying tribute to his colleagues' contributions and underestimating his invention. He emphasized that his greatest wish is to solve the problems of the world through computer collaboration.

In 1997, Engelbart received the Lemerson Prize for invention and innovation in the United States, with a prize of $500,000. Three years later, then US President Bill Clinton awarded Engelbart the US National Technology Award because he " laid the foundation for personal computing technology."

Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925, and grew up in a small farm near Portland. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and spent two years in World War II to join the US Navy as an electronic and radar technician.

After World War II, Engelbart received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1955. But after staying in school, a colleague of Engelbart warned him that if he continued to talk about his "fanatic dreams" about computers changing the world, he could only be an assistant professor. So Engelbart left the school and went to Stanford Research as a researcher.