A Man, a Mouse, a Mission

If the name Douglas C. Engelbart ever comes up on TV's Jeopardy game show, the question doubtless will have been: "Who invented the computer mouse?" In fact, that's hardly Engelbart's only claim. More than a gizmo inventor, he was also a pioneer of the graphical user interface, showing how his mouse could be used to help nontechies get far more out of computing by pointing and clicking instead of memorizing arcane computer commands. He also developed an e-mail and online service of sorts back in 1968, three years before Netscape Communications founder Marc Andreessen was born.

Ask Engelbart, and he says his life's work is about an even more audacious goal: trying to figure out ways to help the human race solve its increasingly complex problems. Now 78, he continues to work nearly full-time at the Bootstrap Institute, which he founded to work on this task. Much of Englebart's work is on developing a new collaborative online interface called an "Open Hyperdocument System," which would allow companies, governments, or other entities to create and then use ever-changing "knowledge repositories" that could be used to more quickly find solutions to complex problems.