“[Doug Engelbart], for those who haven’t heard of him, conceived of and then went on to invent much of what we value today in computing from the standpoint of the user.
Networks, graphical computing, hypertext, the mouse — Doug’s the guy behind all of those in one way or another. He is best known as the inventor of the mouse, but his work goes far beyond that. …
[N]early all of those innovations first came to him during a momentary fugue state Doug entered while driving to work one day in 1950.”1950? That’s right. In 2004 Robert Cringely wrote a swift introduction to the career and accomplishments of Douglas Engelbart, whose vision for computing was decades ahead of its time, but was largely ignored until the first Mac came to be.
You can watch the famous 1968 demonstration here (74 minutes).
