Engelbart's Mouse and the 1968 Demo
A wooden-shelled pointing device built at SRI and shown to the public in 1968 as part of a demonstration of interactive computing.
Douglas Engelbart led a team at the Stanford Research Institute that worked on ways to augment human intellect with computers. Bill English built the first mouse prototype in 1964 for Engelbart, a wooden shell with two wheels set at right angles. A patent application was filed in 1967 and granted in 1970.
On December 9, 1968, Engelbart gave a 90-minute public demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. He showed the mouse with hypertext, shared screens, video conferencing and collaborative editing running on his oNLine System, called NLS. The event is often called the 'mother of all demos'.
Why it matters
The demo previewed features that reached the public decades later, including the mouse, windows and hyperlinks. Many Xerox PARC researchers had worked with Engelbart's group, and they carried the ideas into the Alto.
Key facts
- First prototype built in 1964.
- Patent filed in 1967 and granted in 1970.
- Demonstrated on December 9, 1968.
- The first mouse had two wheels and a wooden shell.
Sources
- Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray, et al. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd ed. Westview Press, 2013.
- Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford University Press, 2000.
- Stanford University Libraries, "The Doug Engelbart Collection" (Special Collections).