Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart devoted his career to using computers to augment human intelligence rather than replace it. At the Stanford Research Institute he led a lab that invented the computer mouse and developed hypertext links, windows, and shared-screen collaboration. In December 1968 he presented these ideas in a live public demonstration later called the Mother of All Demos, which showed the world what interactive, networked computing could be. His vision shaped the personal computer and the graphical interfaces that followed, though he felt the industry adopted his tools without his deeper goal of collective problem-solving.