In 1967 , the engineer Douglas Engelbart devised a pointing device that the computer user could move by hand and transfer the corresponding movement to the screen. The concept of Engelbart, who was then working for the Stanford Research Institute in Melon Park (California), was materialized by Xerox engineers in a mill shaped bar of soap which was christened mouse (mouse, in English ).
The Apple firm made the mouse a standard hallmark on Macintosh computers, and with the development of Windows it became a common part of PCs.
A little history
That simple device invented by Engelbart drastically changed the way humans interact with their computers . Since the first public demonstration of the mouse in 1968, more than a billion have been sold worldwide. Although it is now gradually being overtaken by touch panels and touch screens, the mouse and the concepts behind it are still an important feature of all modern computers.
Engelbart was born in 1925 in Portland, Oregon, one of three children of Carl Engelbart, a radio repairman, and his wife Gladys. He studied at Oregon State University, from which he graduated in 1948 after wartime military service, and went on to finish his studies seven years later, earning a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (USA). USA).
He joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1957 and founded the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), leading a team responsible for creating ideas and bringing them to life. . One day, while driving to work, he experienced a vision of the future of computing, as he later described: “people sitting in front of cathode ray tube screens, ‘flying’ in an information space where they could formulate and present their concepts so that they could better harness hitherto untapped sensory, perceptual and cognitive abilities. They would then communicate and organize their ideas in community with incredible speed and flexibility. “
Engelbart’s seminal 1962 article, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework , describes a future personal computer with an example. “Let’s consider an architect at work. You sit at a workstation that has a one meter viewing screen on one side; this is your work surface, and it is controlled by a computer (your ’employee’) with which you can communicate using a small keyboard and other devices. “
The computer hardware or software to create this predicted world of work did not yet exist. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said of that visionary document and the Engelbart developments that followed: “What he did was absolutely brilliant and well ahead of his time back then. He saw where the future was going.”
As part of this vision of a better interaction between man and machine, Engelbart came up with the idea of a small box that could move a cursor on a screen through corresponding movements on a desktop. Working in 1964 with his colleague, William English, he made a prototype of wooden and metal wheels , connected to the computer with a cable, the “tail” that led to the device being described as the “mouse”.
In December 1968, Engelbart demonstrated during an hour-long session various technologies that would define computing in the latter part of the 20th century. These included the mouse, a visual screen, video conferencing, and the use of the first two computers on ARPAnet, the predecessor to the current Internet. Since then, the presentation went down in the annals of computer science history as the “mother of all demos.”
Engelbart received a patent for the mouse in 1970, but it did not enter mainstream use until more than a decade later. Apple designers visited the Xerox PARC research center in the late 1970s looking for ideas for two computers known as the Lisa and the Macintosh. It was there that they first encountered the mouse and decided to adopt it for commercial use .
After the visit, Steve Jobs, the then CEO of Apple, told industrial designer Dean Hovey: “What you have to do, what we have to do together, is build a mouse.” Hovey, who had not previously heard of a mouse, recalled: “When I walked out that door, I was ready to change the world.” His first prototype was “hacked” over a weekend, using a plate of butter and the ball of a roll of deodorant.
Although Apple’s Lisa computer was not a success, the Macintosh machine, launched in 1984, set the new standard. Mice have since been created in many shapes, sizes, and colors, but all are based on basic principles enshrined in Engelbart’s invention of the 1960s.
In 1997 Engelbart won the Lemelson-MIT Prize of $ 500-000 for his invention. Three years later, he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Bill Clinton . In recent years, Engelbart had led a group of experts, Bootstrap Alliance , whose goals are to improve individual human intelligence through the enhancement of humanity’s collective intelligence.
Douglas Carl Engelbart died on July 2, 2013 at the age of 88 from kidney failure.
