Douglas Engelbart
Also: Doug Engelbart
Set out to augment human intellect — and invented the mouse, hypertext links, and the demo to prove it.
Douglas Engelbart devoted his life to a single goal: using computers to augment the human intellect so that people could cope with ever more complex and urgent problems. At his Stanford Research Institute lab he built the oN-Line System (NLS), inventing or refining the mouse, on-screen windows, hypertext links, outlining, and real-time collaborative editing.
He presented it all at once in 1968 in what became known as the Mother of All Demos — ninety minutes that showed interactive computing more than a decade ahead of its time. His strategy of bootstrapping — using your tools to improve your tools — anchors the tools-for-thought tradition.