Did you use a mouse recently? Did you type on a keyboard? Did you click on a link? Connect to a computer network? Odds are, if you’re reading this, you have. You can thank Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) for all of these inventions and more.

In December 1950, Engelbart had it all. He was engaged to be married,  had a good job as a radar technician, and was generally doing well for himself. At this point, he decided that this wasn’t good enough. He decided he wanted to improve the world and that, although they were in their infancy, computers were the best way to do this.

Even though computers at the time were enormous mainframes, totally unavailable to the public, Engelbart had a vision of

“intellectual workers sitting at display ‘working stations’, flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life’s mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools.” (quote from wikipedia).

Engelbart went back to graduate school in electrical engineering and quickly became one of the worlds foremost experts in computer-human interaction in a time when most people had never even seen a computer.

Just four days ago, on July 2, Engelbart passed away. He never retired. R.I.P. Douglas Engelbart, you’ve done humanity a great service.

Most of Engelbart’s philosophy can be found in the book Boosting Our Collective IQ, by Douglas C. Engelbart.

There’s a nice memorial to Engelbart on xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/1234/