Engelbart, Douglas Carl, 1925–2013, American engineer and inventor, b. Portland, Oreg., Ph.D Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1955. He was a radar technician in the navy during World War II and an electronics technician (1948–51) at the Ames Research Center, Calif. He joined (1957) the Stanford Research Institute (later SRI), where he established a government-backed research group, the Augmentation Research Center (later acquired by Tymshare and McDonnell Douglas). Engelbart believed the future of the computer lay in collaborative problem-solving and what he called “the collective IQ.” He invented (1964) the first version of the computer mouse and also developed several other interactive computer technologies that contributed to the development of the computer and the Internet. In 1968 he demonstrated how, with a mouse, a keyboard, and a screen, he could edit text, use windows and hyperlinks, and employ video conferencing.
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