1925-

Electrical engineer who invented the computer mouse and pioneered the design of modern interactive-computer environments. The grandson of early western pioneers, Engelbart grew up near Portland, Oregon, and served with the Navy during World War II as an electronics technician. He went on to work with NASA's Ames Research Laboratory and the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart gained an interest in computers and envisioned an easily navigable interface that would allow them to be used in offices around the world. In 1963 he started his own research lab devoted to the augmentation of human intellect via technology. Throughout the 1960s his lab developed a hypermedia-groupware system called NLS (oNLine System), which debuted—along with the first computer mouse—at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference.