Doug Engelbart
Major
Accomplishment: Douglas
Engelbart has always been ahead of his time, having ideas that seemed
far-fetched at the time but later were taken for granted. For instance, as far
back as the 1960s he was touting the use of computers for online conferencing
and collaboration. Engelbart's most famous invention is the computer mouse,
also developed in the 1960s, but not used commercially until the 1980s. Like
Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider, Engelbart wanted to use technology to
augment human intellect. He saw technology, especially computers, as the
answers to the problem of dealing with the ever more complex modern world and
has dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technology to augment human
intellect.