Subject areaProcess and organisation
Also known asDoug Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart (Portland, 1925 - Atherton, 2013) was an American engineer and computer scientist.
At the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) he founded the Augmentation Research Center, a lab devoted to one clear idea: the computer as a tool that augments the human intellect rather than replacing it.
His group produced the mouse, and on 9 December 1968, in San Francisco, Engelbart presented the NLS system in public in what went down in history as "The Mother of All Demos": the mouse, hypertext (text with links that lead to other texts), windows on the screen, and two people editing one document at a distance. Much of what people do with an office computer today is already there. This is why the blog counts him among the giants of the web, next to Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee.
Source: Wikidata Q92614 e Wikipedia, voce Douglas Engelbart, consultati il 19/10/2026 e il 23/10/2026, per le date della vita e per la dimostrazione del 1968.
An example
A sales team preparing a proposal in the same shared document, each member at their own computer with a cursor moving across the screen, is using almost every tool Engelbart showed in 1968.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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