They’re starting to become rarer, but for many of us, the thing next to our keyboard is still a major part of our lives in front of a computer. I’m talking about the mouse, and sadly we mark the passing of another of the computing industries pioneers, it’s inventor Douglas Engelbart.
Douglas Carl Englebart was born in 1925, in Portland Oregon. He died in 2013, in Atherton, California. In between he spent an extensive part of his life in various research roles.
He worked at the augmentation Research Centre, part of the Stamford Research Institute, located in Menlo Park, California. Here he gave a famed demonstration to the world (along with his collaborators) of the NLS system, which they had been working on since 1962. Although the mouse was part of the demonstration, it also covered hyperlinking, simultaneous collaboration on the same document over a network as well as audio and video links between the users. Some of these things are still only just becoming part of the reality of many computer users today.
The demonstration of this system was held on December 9, 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in the Convention Center in San Francisco. Clips of a video of the demonstration are available at the Stanford website, Douglas Englebart 1968 Demo
His invention saw major use when Apple, in their tradition of borrowing good ideas from other people, included a mouse with the Apple Lisa, as part of the overall user interface experience, delivering one of the first commercial implementations of a WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse Pointer) environment. This later exploded when the Apple Macintosh, the successor to the the Lisa was launched. The concept rapidly became adopted in the PC world, and in the case of CAD programs, the mouse was adopted well before the advent of Microsoft Windows.
The first mice were horrible contraptions (by today’s standards), with a rubber ball, and slotted discs connected by axles that rubbed against the ball. The most notable thing I remember about the original mice was that you would regularly have to remove the ball, and clean the interior which had collected all the fluff and dust that accumulates on even the cleanest desk when you’re not looking. The second most notable thing I remember was that this continual cleaning process loosened the cover surrounding the ball, and quite often, you ended up with a perfectly functional mouse, but the only way to maintain the ball in the socket was to keep it captive inside the upturned mouse.. losing the cover wasn’t fatal, just very annoying.
This design was faithful to Douglas Engelbart’s original, and was maintained for a long time until the advent of the optical (more correctly laser) mouse. Optical mice once and for all displaced with problem of the fluff and missing mouse-ball covers, and instead replaced the ball with a sensor that detected the reflected pattern of light from the surface below, and tracked the differing levels of light caused by the minute changes in the surface (which is why they never worked very well on glass). Now the mouse communicates without it’s previously necessary tail, using radio, particularly Bluetooth to provide movement information back to the host computer.
Now we are more used to laptops with pointers and trackpads, tablets and phones with touch screens, and other input methods that avoid the need for an external device that takes up deskspace. But the mouse is something we have become familiar with, and grown to accept, if not love, as it helps us on our day to day tasks of interfacing with technology.
Douglas Engelbart, thank you for the mouse, a simple design and another of those good ideas that we can’t now do without.
