NEW YORK - William English, the engineer and researcher who helped build the first computer mouse and, in 1968, orchestrated an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today, died on July 26 in San Rafael, California. He was 91.
It was a concept that would come to define the information age, but by his own admission Engelbart had struggled to explain his vision to others. English made this a reality, building the first computer mouse and, through a series of tests, showing that it could navigate a screen faster than any other device developed at SRI.
This Mother of All Demos - showing early forms of online text editing, video conferencing and"hypertext", the links now used to navigate webpages on the internet - presaged not only the desktop and laptop computers that rose to the fore in the 1980s and '90s, but also the smartphones and tablets that would come to suffuse everyday life.
His time in the Navy included postings in Northern California and Japan. He then took his research position at the Stanford Research Institute, at first working on a new kind of computer memory - a rotating metal drum the size of a desk that could store as many as three pages of text - before embracing the project that became NLS.
As they were developing the system, both English and Engelbart were part of the government-funded LSD tests conducted by a nearby lab called the International Foundation of Advanced Study. Both took the psychedelic as part of a sweeping effort to determine whether it could"open the mind" and foster creativity.
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