Douglas Engelbart inventor of a mouse

Born in 1925, Engelbart studied electrical engineering. In 1957 he joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, where he was later given his own research lab. There, his team developed the revolutionary oNLine System (NLS). This allowed up to 16 workstations to operate together, running programs with multiple windows between which text and objects could move


During World War II, the young Engelbart worked as a radar technician for the navy. His knowledge of how radar information was displayed on-screen inspired his 1951 vision of how hypertext might work

A vision of the future

Every time you use a mouse to click on a link to a new web page, you have American electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to thank. Engelbart was an early computer pioneer. As far back as 1951, he imagined screens with information flowing between them, and people navigating the screens to learn, form, and organize their ideas. Sounds familiar? He could be describing the Internet and hypertext—text with active links to other pages.

New controls
In the early 1950s, very few computers existed, and they were controlled by experts and engineers
using punched cards or rewiring circuits. Engelbart’s vision demanded faster, simpler, more natural ways of working. His team developed cursors that could be dragged around the screen. They also experimented with corded key sets (keyboards), where pressing down different combinations of five piano like keys created commands.