Doug Engelbart: Inventor of the computer mouse
1925-2013
DOUG Engelbart, who has died aged 88, was known as the “father of the modern PC interface” and most famously the “mouse”.
Engelbart was working as an engineer at the Ames Research Centre in California after World War 2 when he had what he later described as a vision of the information age — a world in which people could interact with computers and use them to share information, solve global problems collectively and make the world a better place.
It was an idea well ahead of the capabilities of computers of the time — huge room-sized devices accessible only to technicians, who used computer tape or punch cards to ask them questions.
In the 1960s, Engelbart led a team of researchers engaged in finding ways of improving the performance and accessibility of computers. The team beavered away in obscurity until December 9 1968, when, in what has been described as the “mother of all demos”, Engelbart gave an hourlong presentation to a technology conference in San Francisco on his vision of the future.
Using a custom-built workstation, homemade modem and staff linked in from his laboratory, Engelbart demonstrated what he called an “online system”. He used the computer screen as an interface for working with a linked-in computer network.
In his system, each program lived inside its own on-screen “window”. Little pictures, which he called “icons”, were used to run software, access information and call up the PC’s most common features.
To interact with the icons and menus, Engelbart demonstrated a “pointing device”.
Engelbart had first started working on the gadget in 1961. Several ideas were tried, including a joystick, a tracking ball, a knee-operated pointer and even a foot-operated control called a “rat”, before one of Engelbart’s collaborators built an “X-Y positioning device” made from a boxy wooden shell on two wheels, one turning vertically, the other horizontally, topped with a cheap plastic switch and linked to the computer by a connecting cord, or “tail”, at the front.
“Somebody said it looked like a one-eared mouse,” Engelbart recalled. “We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name. But it didn’t.”
The notion of operating a computer with such a tool was way ahead of its time, and it would be another 15 years before Steve Jobs began to turn the mouse into a huge commercial success with the launch of Apple’s new Macintosh computer. As a result, Engelbart received little in the way of royalties. The mouse was licensed to Apple for about $40 000. — © The Daily Telegraph, London