If you’ve used a mouse to click this article, you can thank Douglas Engelbart. The longtime inventor passed away in the late hours of July 2, at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88 years old.

In addition to inventing the computer mouse, Engelbart helped develop other technologies that have become commonplace in the computing world, including pioneering hypertext, networking, and the early stages of graphical user interfaces. He will always be one of the giants of Silicon Valley.

Most famously, Engelbart gave a now-legendary presentation on December 8, 1968, in San Francisco later known as “The Mother of all Demos.” In it, he gave the world’s first demonstration of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and a collaborative real-time editor.

Today, many across the tech world lamented the loss of Engelbart. Howard Rheingold, a noted tech writer, tweeted: “I'd say that most of what I've written was inspired by the day I met Doug Engelbart in 1983.”

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation added: “We gave him our Pioneer Award in 1992, but it's impossible to express his impact as a computing pioneer.”

“Augmenting Human Intellect”

Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”

In the paper, he described a “writing machine” that is certainly recognizable to all Ars staff today:

This writing machine would permit you to use a new process of composing text. For instance, trial drafts could rapidly be composed from re-arranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which you stop to type in. Your first draft could represent a free outpouring of thoughts in any order, with the inspection of foregoing thoughts continuously stimulating new considerations and ideas to be entered. If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft became too complex, you would compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs. You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record. If it is easier to update any part of your working record to accommodate new developments in thought or circumstance, you will find it easier to incorporate more complex procedures in your way of doing things. This will probably allow you to accommodate the extra burden associated with, for instance, keeping and using special files whose contents are both contributed to and utilized by any current work in a flexible manner—which in turn enables you to devise and use even-more complex procedures to better harness your talents in your particular working situation.

UPDATE, Thursday, July 4 12:55am CT: In an e-mail sent to Ars, Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, had this to say about Engelbart: