Things were clear from minute one. When Douglas Engelbarthead of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), at Stanford, wanted to interview a new recruit, gave him a pencil attached to a brick and then asked him to write his name on a piece of paper. Difficult, right?, joked Engelbart, a doctor in electrical engineering and a pioneer in computer development. Well, people would encounter the same problems, he explained to the candidates, if they were not able to offer them more agile and simple tools to use computers.
He wasn’t talking just to talk.
Engelbart, together with one of his colleagues, also an engineer William Englishwas the father of the first mouse computer in the 1960s. Only that one was not called a mouse, but XY Position Indicator for a Display System; and its design was quite different from the modern peripherals that we use today. To begin with, it was made of wood and had a pair of metal wheels.
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Make it easy for people: “Click”
In the early 1960s, Engelbart, a World War II veteran, recent PhD and with just a couple of years of experience at the Stanford Research Institute —today known as SRI— had a clear idea: he wanted accessible technology. And simple. In 1945, while serving in the US Navy, he had read an article by the inventor Vannevar Bush who encouraged scientists to bring knowledge to the streets and he was determined to transfer that slogan to his own field.
The golden opportunity came when the Department of Defense, through DARPAgave him the necessary support to set up his own center in the SRI, the ARC.
There he had nearly fifty people working for him and efforts were focused on answering a question: What would the future of computer communication be like? At that time, computing had been in development for decades; IBM had manufactured the IBM 650 and the team was convinced of the enormous potential of the sector. The question was how to use it and prevent the systems from being as unwieldy as a pencil stuck to a brick.
At that time the most popular devices for pointing on a screen were optical pencilsa system similar to that used in military radars. Since 1961 Engelbart, however, ruminated on an alternative. To make interaction with computers more efficient: install a pair of small wheels across a table so that the user could operate the screen cursor with them. One would rotate horizontally and the other vertically and its operation would be very similar to that of the planimeter commonly used by surveyors, geographers and architects.
The idea had been recorded in his notebook, but already in the 1960s, with the financial backing of DARPA, his own team and extra help from NASAEngelbart was able to delve into it. The veteran and his colleagues gathered the best signaling equipment that existed and made a kind of brainstorming which left half a dozen proposals for working with monitors, some of the most curious, such as a joystick or a light pen. Perhaps the most striking of all was a mechanism that was fixed under the table and operated with the knee.
A prototype nicknamed “mouse”
Also included among that amalgam was a small device manufactured by Bill English after reviewing his notes from the beginning of the decade with Engelbart.
The prototype basically consisted of a carved redwood block which included two wheels crimped at the bottom and a button at the top. Your name: XY Position Indicator for a Display System. Its appearance, compact and with a cable protruding, However, it ended up earning him the nickname “mouse.”. It was so comfortable that it prevailed over the rest of the laboratory’s alternatives and the team included it as a standard piece in their research. The SRI applied for the mouse patent in 1967 and received it in 1970.
Engelbart and his companions did not stop there. They continued looking for a “companion” for the mouse, another device that the user could operate with their free hand and could use to enter commands and text. After several tests they opted for a device similar to a telephone with five keys.
They also carried out tests to perfect the mouse design as much as possible. “We did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons it should have. We tried up to five. We decided on three. That’s all we could fit in. Now, the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac,” Engelbart himself recalled in 2004, in an interview with Wired.
With all this material and the rest of the inventions developed by his team, the war veteran decided to put on a gala performance. One like a beast. In 1968 they organized known as “mother of all demos”a historic conference held in San Francisco in which Engelbart showed all the functions they had developed over the last few years.
“For 90 minutes, the stunned audience of more than a thousand professionals witnessed many of the features of modern computing for the first time: live video conferencing, document sharing, word processing, windows, and a strange pointing device jokingly referred to as “the mouse“The elements of the screen were linked to others through associative links or hypertexts,” explains the Computer History Museum.
“People were amazed. In one hour, it defined the era of modern computing,” English commented to New York Times in 1996. Shortly after that historic achievement, however, the team began to lose its drive. Some staff questioned the lab’s drift, DARPA cut its funding, and other research centers began to emerge, such as the Xerox in Palo Alto (PARC). Result? Many of Engelbart’s employees sought new destinations.
With them went the very concept of the mouse. The device, with a trackball, ended up being incorporated into the Xerox Alto computer and in 1983 Apple marketed it with its computer Lisa. After a while –as you remember Washington Post— Steve Jobs’ company was behind almost half of the 500,000 mice sold. Meanwhile, Engelbart and English saw the idea that the mouse had been a Xerox invention.
Its enormous success—whoever writes this, in the middle of 2022, still uses a mouse— It didn’t bring them much benefit either.. Although Engelbart’s name appears on the device’s patent, the copyright remained with the SRI, which ended up paying him around $10,000 for the invention.
Many years later, well into the 21st century, with the Internet, smartphones and laptops expanding, Engelbart acknowledged, however, that what really surprised him was that we continue to refer to the device by the nickname they gave it in his laboratory.
“I’m surprised the name has stuck,” explained in 2004nine years before his death.
Click (mouse), and end.
In Xataka |
In Xataka |
In Xataka |
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