A prototype of the modern computer mouse was presented to the public on December 9, 1968 at the Interactive Devices Conference held in San Francisco. The device was a wooden box with two gears inside. A long cord, reminiscent of a mouse's tail, stretched behind the box, and a single control button was located on top. A year later, a patent was issued for the invention, issued in the name of Karl Engelbart Douglas.
Great dream
Karl Douglas Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in the American city of Portland. The childhood of the future inventor was spent on a small family farm. The boy did not stand out among his peers, did not possess outstanding talents. In 1942, he entered the University of Oregon and was preparing to work as an electrical engineer. However, fate decreed otherwise. Engelbart was soon drafted into the US Navy and went to serve in the Philippines.
Douglas became a radio technician and maintained radar installations at one of the naval bases. There, in the library of the Red Cross, Engelbart discovered a publication that turned his whole future life. This was an article by the American IT and computer scientist Vannevar Bush "As We May Think". The young man was seriously carried away by the theory of animating inanimate nature set forth in it.
Douglas's dream was the development of human intellectual abilities or, as he put it, "bootstrapping" with the help of artificial intelligence. Observing the curves on the monitors, Douglas wondered why the capabilities of computers were not used for the preliminary processing of information. It would be much more convenient to issue commands using a computer, and to see enemy aircraft and their characteristics on the monitors.
Lord of mice
After the war, Douglas graduated from the university and from 1948 to 1955 he worked in the California NASA laboratory. The idea of creating a manipulator, which should facilitate the control of a computer for astronauts, dates back to this time. But the device created by Engelbart could not work in zero gravity conditions and was rejected. And Douglas's ideas about the fusion of human intelligence and computer power did not find support from the leadership.
In 1955, Engelbart received his Ph. D. and left NASA to take part in the work on the CALDIC (Califotnia Digital Computer) project, the development of which was funded by the military. And a year later, he moved to the Stanford Research Institute, where he was developing magnetic computer components. There, the young scientist finally got the opportunity to create his own laboratory, known as the Augmentation Research Center.
Using the most severe selection method, he attracted 47 people to work, starting the development of the NLS (On-Line System) system. For the first time, it used a graphical interface, a multi-window system for displaying information, implemented the ability to work with the clipboard, created an e-mail and a text editor. Douglas's mainframe became the second computer connected to the military network ARPANet, which was being created in those years, the prototype of the modern Internet.
Victorious procession
But Engelbart's most famous invention turned out to be a computer mouse developed specifically for NLS. The first copy, which bore the official name "X and Y position indicator", was assembled in 1962 by one of Douglas's colleagues, engineer Bill English. Drivers for the device were written by Jeff Rulifson. The manipulator could move around the table in only one direction - horizontally or vertically. His movements were transformed into the movement of the cursor on the computer monitor.
Douglas's designs were too complicated for the time and were unsuccessful. The employees began to leave the inventor. Bill English joined Xerox PARC where he continued to work on the manipulator. Instead of internal disks, a rubberized metal ball was used, the movement of which was fixed by rollers inside the body. This made it possible to move the mouse at an angle. The number of control buttons has grown to three.
In this form, the mouse was used in the Xerox Star 8010 and Alto computer systems. But real popularity came to it only in the 80s, when Apple bought the patent for its manufacture. A new model of a one-button mouse designed for the Lisa computer was presented by the company in 1983. At the same time, the price of the manipulator dropped from $ 400 to $ 25. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, laser and wireless mice developed by Logitech entered the market.
