Mr. English, known to everyone as Bill, was one of the few who understood these ideas and who had the engineering talent, patience and social skills needed to realize them. “He was the guy who made everything happen,” said Bill Duvall, who worked alongside Mr. English during those years. “If you told him something needed to be done, he figured out how to do it.”Among other things, Mr. Engelbart, who died in 2013 at 88, envisioned a mechanical device that could move a cursor across a screen and perform discrete tasks by selecting particular symbols or images. Mr. English made this a reality, building the first computer mouse and, through a series of tests, showing that it could navigate a screen faster than any other device developed at S.R.I. Mr. English directed this elaborate production from the back of the auditorium, relying on cameras and microphones both there and at the lab that housed the computer in Menlo Park, Calif., more than 30 miles away.

Source: International New York Times July 31, 2020 21:22 UTC