Doug Engelbart. Doug Engelbart basically invented interactive computing. The concept of putting information on a screen. Navigating through it. Looking at information in different ways. Pointing at things and manipulating them. He came up with all this at a time when real-time interaction with a computer was just almost unheard of. Today he is best known as the inventor of the mouse, but what he really invented is this entirely new way of working with knowledge. His explicit goal from the beginning was to enable mankind to solve the world's urgent problems. And his vision, he had this vision of what he called knowledge workers using complex powerful information tools to harness their collective intelligence. And he only got into computers because he had a hunch that these new things called computer things could help him realize that vision. Everything that he did was almost single-mindedly driven by pursuing this vision.
