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The First Mouse

Posted by Hemos on Thu Sep 14, 2000 01:58 PM
from the looking-back-down-history-trail dept.
Technology
martin writes "On Dec. 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the on live system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. The original 90-minute video of this event is part of the Engelbart Collection in Special Collections of Stanford University. Hyperlinks Mouse Web-board Kinda knocks BT's patent for hyperlinking out of the water" The stuff is in Real format.
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  • See Also: Vennevar Bush (Score:5)

    by kzinti (9651) on Thursday September 14 2000, @09:21AM (#779434) Homepage Journal
    "Kinda knocks BT's patent for hyperlinking out of the water"

    1962, huh? Take a look at the Vannevar Bush essay "As We May Think" [isg.sfu.ca], which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. The technology Bush talks about includes photography and typewriters -- nothing so modern as a "mouse". But those are mere implementation details; the ideas contained in his essay very much resemble the kinds of things we are now doing on the WWW. In fact, in Bush's discussion of users appending an annotating encyclopedia articles, we can see glimpses of Slashdot itself! (Though Bush says nothing about moderation or Anonymous Cowards.) Fascinating reading, and highly recommended.

    --Jim
  • Englebart's Unfinished Vision [stanford.edu].

    This man is truly a god and it just pisses me off thinking that some other clown [microsoft.com] gets all the attention because he can use his great marketing clout to rip off the public.

    What sad times are these.

    Vote Nader [votenader.org]
  • s/THE TAG/THE TAG
    yes I know I suck
    yes I know I should
    have hit preview

    Don't learn from your mistakes, do you? :) I assume you mean the <BLINK> tag?

  • Somebody remind me what we're so proud about in the IT biz? And what's all this nonsense about "freedom to innovate" that gets thrown around when the Big Companies try to defend their property-mad strategies?

    It is a sad commentary on the industry that the company (Xerox) that supported many firsts in computer technology was blind to the importance of "computing for the poeple" and left it to others to rip off their innovations (Apple, IBM, Microsoft) more than ten years later.

    A free market and copyright protection does NOTHING to advance the field. 100 companies reinventing the wheel does not make any sense, especially if you have a perfectly good one lying around in the public domain. But the "not invented here" mentality leads to the a)destruction of competing visions or b)the stagnation of a promising development if it does not fit into the parent company's market "vision".

    Lots of money made, and the only innovations are being made by people writing viruses. I thought this technology was supposed to empower ordinary people, not prop up a technocratic elite and raise Electronic Warfare to a whole new level.

    We should just hang ourselves with our mice... does anybody know the load bearing properties of USB cord?
  • Although the video voice-over comments on that they just started calling it a mouse and they don't know why, during that same point in the video, where they are demonstrating using the mouse, the representation on the computer screen, at least to my eyes, does look like a mouse running around. (A small mouse, mind you, but that's the impression I got.)

    Kierthos
  • Maybe cause it looked like one? (more like a rat)

    Hence the funniest Radio Shack commercial ever.

    "Woudja look at da size of dat mouse!? Its so big you should call it a RAT!"

    "In no time at all mister, you will be surfin' da weeb."

  • ...didn't Al Gore invent the mouse?

    --
  • Well, technically, there are only links to three small bits of it. A lot of people might look at those, but the people who will actually take the time to put in the URLs of the other parts and watch all ninety minutes will probably be far fewer...
  • Or was it the sub[rats]liminal message?

    --
  • There is evidence that the first battery was used in 100's AD Iraq to heal people's ailments.

    Which is good, because before that nobody could use the first Walkman (invented in India in the 5th century BC).

  • The Mother Of All Demos (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Those that were there on that fateful day still refer to Engelbart's presentation as the "Mother Of All Demos." Engelbart's ideas were so fresh and compelling, and his presentation so vivid, that the room fell to silence for minutes after the presentation ended. And this was *1968*!

    Some true luminaries were there to see it: computer graphics pioneers like Andries Van Dam, or hypertext gurus like Ted Nelson, to name a few.

    The reverberations of this demonstration are still felt in the walls of academia today; some of the ideas have finally exited the academic bottle and entered industry (witness the Web) -- but the true weath and potential of the ideas presented on that day has never been fully tapped.

    Anyone interested in the history and future of the technology would do well to pay attention to Bush and Engelbart, as well as video from that one unbelievable day.
  • I read some article about a mouse that was shown at a worlds fair in the 20-30's time frame. People don't invent they just re-dicover.
  • I've heard rumours that the "official" name was the rodentiometer and that the smallest detectable unit of mouse movement is called a "mickey".

    Can't remember where I read that though.
  • They're all cool....well maybe not mickey...but the true lord of the mices is Speedy Gonzalez.

    -Kriticism

  • Chord keyboards do exist.

    Check this link out http://www.nanopac.com/Keyboard.htm [nanopac.com]

    I've allways wanted to buy one of these keyboards, but never got around to it.
  • He's probably spinning in his grave right now.

    Thats kind of hard to do when YOU'RE NOT DEAD...
  • There were even a few before Vannevar Bush (not to take anything away from Van).

    H.G. Wells [berkeley.edu] conceived a "world Brain" or "world Mind" back in the late thirties. The basic concepts are very similar to the Web.

    And even earlier (like 1907/8) A Belgian named Paul Otlet had similar ideas and actually executed some of them in a paper fashion. See this entry [berkeley.edu] at Michael Buckland's site, or a brief mention [berkeley.edu] in Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
  • I thought this technology was supposed to empower ordinary people, not prop up a technocratic elite and raise Electronic Warfare to a whole new level.

    Sorry, that probably is exactly what it was supposed to do. Places like SRI and Rand got most of their funding from DOD.... possibly PARC had a substantial whack as well. The techno-elite of the '60 (like the techno-elite of today, imho) for the most part had no interest in empowering ordinary people (I'll grant Englebart an exception to this rule, but he was possibly unique). They needed to pay the mortgage on their house in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Menlo and keep those DOD contracts coming.

    WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

  • See this interview [ddj.com] in the Sept 2000 issue of Dr. Dobbs journal. Doug Engelbart has an amazing foresight into the future of computing. Even now he is innovating through his Bootstrap Institute [bootstrap.org] and the items at his site is a must read for anyone interested in the field of computing and man-machine interfaces.
  • if it hadn't been slashdotted i'd have seen that ;)

    thanks!
  • I only use the w,a,s,&d keys (plus r if I have to reload).

    'r' to reload? Are you playing Half-Life?

    I didn't connect Quake games with Englebart before this. I doubt he ever expected to see people using his mouse to fire rocket launchers at each other for fun and gibs!

    steveha

  • Hyperlinks [128.253.243.142]
    Mouse [128.253.243.142]
    Web-board [128.253.243.142]

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

  • Using the blink tag since 1200bc.. and we still haven't learned from our mistakes =)

    ---
  • The principle of satellite navigation is much older than this swede. A couple of weeks ago I read a science fiction story from the turn of the century (I mean around 1900) where a bunch of people started a satellite on a polar orbit for navigational purposes. Of course the wanted to use it optically (what made the satellite bright white and large), but the principle was if not born in that story then at least known back then.
    Digging in science history is fun!
  • Shows you just how unoriginal we are. it'd be nice if more of this stuff would come out and remind people just who created all the things they enjoy. Moron: "OH MY GOSH LOOK I INVENTED THE TAG" Satan: "umm I have been using blink tags in on my website since 1200 bc"
  • It's truly amazing when you think about it. Back in the 1960s the first mouse was the size of a small boat. It took a team of seven scientists to roll it around.

    We really have come a long way.
    -------------------

  • Bah (Score:4)

    by sxyzzx (125040) on Thursday September 14 2000, @09:06AM (#779484)
    Too bad he didn't demo one-click shopping too.
  • s/THE TAG/THE TAG
    yes I know I suck
    yes I know I should
    have hit preview

  • Mouse, yes... chord keyboard, no? (Score:3)

    by steveha (103154) on Thursday September 14 2000, @09:30AM (#779487) Homepage
    What is the most annoying thing about using a computer mouse? Having to take a hand off the keyboard, use the mouse, and then put the hand back on the keyboard.

    Well, Engelbart had that figured out, too. Put one hand on the mouse, and the other hand on a chord keyboard. A person who is comfortable with this arrangement will be amazingly fast at certain tasks.

    Why did the mouse become common and the chord keyboard did not? I suspect it is because "better is the enemy of good enough", as Jerry Pournelle says. The chord keyboard is arguably more efficient, but it isn't enough more efficient to make most people get interested in it.

    My solution to the keyboard/mouse problem is to learn all the keyboard accelerators and use them instead of the mouse, whenever possible.

    steveha

  • If that were the case then Mice would be extremely tiny, but they're the same size they were 20+ years ago (recalling one which employed a magnetic field and grid on a large tablet.)

    Computers aren't getting smaller either, you can just cram so much more in the same space (ATX form factor, etc.) Quantum changes, like the Eniac->PDP-11->PC->Palm are few and far between.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • I'm working on inventing the color red, I should be finished any day now, then I'll copyright it. See anything yet?

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000

  • Better than "Spermatazoa"... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    doh!

  • Does the Patent Office Know? (Score:3)

    by FFFish (7567) on Thursday September 14 2000, @10:28AM (#779494) Homepage
    IMPORTANT: if there is any information in that video that demonstrates prior art that can invalidate some of the more obnoxious existing patents -- ie. BT's hyperlinks patent, various idiotic web database patents, etc -- then it needs to be put to use!

    One of the biggest problems with the high tech industry is that it's just *lousy* at keeping records of things.

    Here we've got an actual video record. It's showing a whole bunch of stuff that only really started to come into use a couple decades later. Without it, it's difficult to overturn some of the patents. With it, it may be a breeze!

    Everyone should be learning a lesson from this: keep detailed records on anything neat you do. It'll come in handy when someone else does it and then tries to make money from it, when the credit should be going to you.

    --

  • Re:See Also: Vennevar Bush (Score:3)

    by Porag_Spliffing (66509) on Thursday September 14 2000, @10:29AM (#779495) Homepage
    So Bush invented the Internet not Gore !

  • The type of mouse we use today was invented by a swede, Håkan Lans [admin.kth.se]. Apple then bought the rights to sell it.
    Lans also invented color graphics and satellite navigation.

    OK, I admit, I am bored...

  • Sure... video on magnetic tape dates from the early sixties, I believe.

    From the look of it, it appears to be one of the half-inch, open-reel, monochrome formats (there were over a dozen varients). If it is, it's amazingly well preserved. Most of the tape from that time has degraded horribly. The "binder" used to attach the magnetic particles to the plactic has "gummed up" on a huge number of tapes. People wanting to play those tapes have to bake them in an oven...and then they only get a single chance to play them.

    BTW, I was dealing with this problem a few weeks ago, and was wondering if it was possible to read the state of the magnatized particles on the tape without using the original machine? Pass it over a simple, non-rotating head with multiple tracks and re-assemble the signal via digital signal processing? The problem is that the rapidly spinning heads would dig into the tape and cause oxide shedding even on brand new tape.

  • lynx -dump pnm://vodreal.stanford.edu/Engel/12Engel200.rm > ~/12Engel200.rm
    ________________
    They're - They are
    Their - Belonging to them
  • why the hell did they decide to call it a "mouse"?

    Let's see... a small grey thing with a long tail.

    Shit! I can't figure it out either!

    -thomas


    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
  • ...is why the hell did they decide to call it a "mouse"?

  • Ahem.... the REAL first mouse is: (Score:4)

    by KingJawa (65904) on Thursday September 14 2000, @09:10AM (#779516) Homepage
    Danger Mouse. He's the greatest. He's the ace. Whenever there is danger, he'll be there!

    Mighty Mouse comes in a close second, with Mickey picking up the rear.
  • I was thinking about this: If mice were so big back then, and computers were so big, maybe *we* were just smaller!

    Perhaps we have just grown up in the past few decades and not realized it, while computers have gotten proportionally smaller.

    Just an idea...

  • It's about the right size, it rolls around the desk, and it has a grey cord hanging out the ass end.

  • He actually answers this. (Score:4)

    by VValdo (10446) on Thursday September 14 2000, @09:15AM (#779523)
    At about 57 seconds into the mouse video he says:

    "I don't know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize- It started that way and we never did change it."

    W
    -------------------
  • I heard that it takes about 25 years for any new technology to find broad commercial application. It seems to only apply to the 19th and 20th centuries, but it's still kind of spooky. It seems to hold true for things like the camera, movies, tv, color tv.

    Now the mouse is one more example: inception in the mid sixties, widespread use in the Mac by the mid eighties

    I for one one think this is the coolest theory, but I wonder if it's speeding up. . .

  • Hey, I didn't think video's were around back then!!

    All those movies that were released from the beginning of the century up through the 70s sometime are just a vast conspiracy of filmmakers, then? :-)

  • So, with stuff like this, what is the correct, legal procedure for presenting it to the Patent Office as prior art? That BT patent (along with several others) needs to be revoked.

    -chill
  • C'mon... the real star of that show was always Baron Sylus Greenback and his henchmen.


    BTW, I think I can hear the "whoosh" of this thread going straight over the heads of the US-based readership :)

  • You can knock something for six, or blow something out of the water but you don't knock something out of the water.
  • Does anyone else think its mean to have slashdot link to 90 minutes of real video? come on, we all know half a million people accessing that at once is gonna take down their server for sure. as a matter of fact I can't get into it right now but maybe thats just realplayer acting bitchy.
  • The opinion expressed in not informative, it's profoundly ignorant. Invention is the process of one idea on another and it's very much about the implementation of those ideas.

    You can't patent going to Mars, or the idea of a time machine. In legal terms you must "reduce to practice". It's just not enough to write some high level speculative and vague view of the future. That is not invention. It is quite ridiculous to cite some whimsical essay of yesteryear and say it is the precursor to that which has followed. It might be visionary or it might be one kernel in a storm of chaff from the same author but in either case it is NOT invention, it's just speculation.

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