Douglas C. Engelbart invented the computer mouse, and though most computer users do not know his name, they certainly know of his creation. This is not his only contribution to technology, however, and he has been an important theorist and inventor for more than four decades.
Engelbart grew up during the Great Depression on a small farm in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from high school in 1942 before studying Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University. He stopped for a time after joining the Navy during World War II, and he served for two years as an electronic/radar technician in the Philippines. He completed his Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1948 and went to work in San Francisco as an electrical engineer at NACA Ames Laboratory (the forerunner of NASA). Feeling dissatisfied and convinced that there was something more important he should be doing, he considered what he had read about the development of the computer and turned his attention to how it might be used to support mankind's efforts to solve various problems. As a radar technician, he had seen how information could be displayed on a screen, and he envisioned people sitting in front of displays, working in an information space where they could formulate and organize their ideas with incredible speed and flexibility. He therefore applied to the graduate program in Electrical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in 1955 and also received half a dozen patents in "bi stable gaseous plasma digital devices." He settled on a research position at Stanford Research Institute, where he earned another dozen patents in two years working on magnetic computer components, fundamental digital device phenomena, and miniaturization scaling potential (Engelbart).
In 1959 he gained approval to pursue his own research and for the next two years formulated a theoretical framework for a new discipline, which would become the guiding force ...