The man and the Computer Interactions. A tribute to the Father of the Mouse.

The term ‘inventor’ is used to describe a person who devises a new contrivance. This is a post to pay tribute to Dr. Douglas Carl Engelbart who during 1968 invented the first computer ‘mouse’ and has revolutionized the manner in which people can use the electronic medium to communicate with each other, and to perform a myriad of functions with absolute ease. I am happy to acknowledge the thirty-year track record of Engelbart in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. The invention of ‘mouse’, a device to control the desktop computer has helped the development of interactive computer technologies. Engelbart had authored over 25 publications, generated 20 patents, including the patent for the first computer mouse. In the late 1980s the mouse became the standard way to control a desktop computer. 

In Doug’s Words:

” The mouse we built for the [1968] show was an early prototype that had three buttons. We turned it around so the tail came out the top. We started with it going the other direction, but the cord got tangled when you moved your arm.

I first started making notes for the mouse in ’61. At the time, the popular device for pointing on the screen was a light pen, which had come out of the radar program during the war. It was the standard way to navigate, but I didn’t think it was quite right.

Two or three years later, we tested all the pointing gadgets available to see which was the best. Aside from the light pen there was the tracking ball and a slider on a pivot. I also wanted to try this mouse idea, so Bill English went off and built it.

We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before. It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I’m surprised the name stuck.

We also did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons the mouse should have. We tried as many as five. We settled on three. That’s all we could fit. Now the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac.”

Doug Engelbart in The Click Heard Round The World, by Ken Jordan, WIRED 2004

Simon Cyrene

Mouse inventor who foresaw the modern internet

Published: in the HINDU, July 5, 2013.

AP VISIONARY: Douglas Engelbart poses with the computer mouse he designed, in this 1997 picture.

The first computer mouse was a wooden shell with metal wheels. The man behind it, tech visionary Doug Engelbart, has died at 88 after transforming the way people work, play and communicate.

The mild-mannered Engelbart had audacious ideas. Long before Apple founder Steve Jobs became famous for his dramatic presentations, Engelbart dazzled the industry at a San Francisco computer conference in 1968.

Working from his house with a homemade modem, he used his lab’s elaborate new online system to illustrate his ideas to the audience, while his staff linked in from the lab. It was the first public demonstration of the mouse and video teleconferencing, and it prompted a standing ovation.

“We will miss his genius, warmth and charm,” said Curtis R. Carlson, the CEO of Stanford Research Institute International, where Engelbart used to work. “Doug’s legacy is immense. Anyone in the world who uses a mouse or enjoys the productive benefits of a personal computer is indebted to him.”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when mainframe computers took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart already was envisioning a day when computers were far more intuitive to use.

One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. The idea was way ahead of its time. The mouse didn’t become commercially available until 1984, with the release of Apple’s then—revolutionary Macintosh computer. Engelbart conceived the mouse so early in the evolution of computers that he and his colleagues didn’t profit much from it. The technology passed into the public domain in 1987, preventing him from collecting royalties on the mouse when it was in its
widest use. At least 1 billion have been sold since the mid-1980s.

Now, their usage is waning as people merely swipe their finger across a
display screen.

“There are only a handful of people who were as influential,” said Marc Weber, founder and curator of the Internet history program at the Computer History Museum, where Engelbart had been a fellow since 2005. “He had a complete vision of what computers could become at a very early stage.”

Among Engelbart’s other key developments in computing, along with his colleagues at SRI International and his own lab, the Augmentation Research Center, was the use of multiple windows. His lab also helped develop ARPANet computer network, the government research network that led to the Internet.

Engelbart played down the importance of his inventions, stressing instead his vision of using collaboration over computers to solve the world’s problems. “Many of those firsts came right out of the staff’s innovations even had to be explained to me before I could understand them,” he said in a biography written by his daughter.

In 1997, Engelbart won the most lucrative award for American inventors, the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. Three years later, President Bill Clinton bestowed Engelbart with the National Medal of Technology “for creating the foundations of personal computing.”

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born January 30, 1925, and studied electrical engineering, taking two years off during World War II to serve as a Navy electronics and radar technician in the Philippines. It was there that he read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and was inspired by the idea of a machine that would aid human cognition. Engelbart later(1955) earned his PhD. at University of California, Berkeley, but after joining the faculty, he was warned by a colleague that if he kept talking about his “wild ideas” he’d be an acting assistant professor forever. So he left for the Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International.

Engelbart is survived by his wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart; his four children, Diana, Christina, Norman and Greda, and nine grandchildren.