A computer pioneer has died

The man who designed the computer mouse and most other elements of today's interactive computer interface has died.  The Telegraph reports:

In the 1960s [Doug] Engelbart led a team of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI’s) Augmentation Research Center, 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 hour-long presentation to a technology conference in San Francisco on his vision of the future.

The presentation was meant to show the world “the computer’s immense potential for improving our collective capability to solve problems”. Using a custom-built workstation and home-made modem, and with staff linked in from his laboratory, Engelbart demonstrated what he called an “online system” based on using 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. Near the top of each window was a list of commands and options known as a “menu”, from which the user could select tasks for the computer to perform.

In tech-speak the presentation featured graphical user interfacing; video conferencing; teleconferencing; hypertext and hyperlinking (which help the user move from document to document); word processing; object addressing; dynamic file linking; and collaborative real-time editing. Meanwhile, to interact with the icons and menus, Engelbart demonstrated a “pointing device” which soon came to be known as a “mouse”.

Engelbart had first started working on the gadget in 1961, after deciding that he could do better than the standard device for user interaction — a light pen which had been used on radar systems during the Second World War.

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 via a connecting cord, or “tail”, at the front.

It was not long before someone noticed that the device had a distinctly rodent-like appearance. “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, neither Engelbart nor the SRI, which held the patent, received much in the way of royalties. SRI licensed the mouse to Apple for about $40,000 and the patent ran out in 1987, before the computer revolution really got going. For his work, SRI paid Engelbart just $10,000. Subsequently he lost federal funding and the SRI ended up selling his research centre.

In any case, Engelbart resisted being identified too closely with the mouse, preferring to stress his broader vision of using linked-in computers to “augment human intellect” — a project he called Collective IQ. Yet he never felt that this vision had been understood. “Companies tell me, 'We have a web site and an Intranet. We’re already there,’” he complained in 1998. “I tell them, 'You’re just using a wheelbarrow. You haven’t really started cultivating the wealth of what you can do’.”

There's more at the link.  Here's a YouTube recording of the 'mother of all demos', if you're interested in computer history.  It's an hour and forty minutes long, but it's the first of its kind ever presented - long before the days of PowerPoint!

So . . . can one say that Mr. Engelbart has finally 'moused over'?

Peter