The birth of computer mice and familiar clicks

In December 1968, a little-known scientist from the Stanford Research Institute made the conference participants in San Francisco quiet. There, he talked about conversation and something called a "mouse".

The scientist was Douglas C. Engelbart, born in 1925 in Portland (USA). In the 50s of the last century, the young Engelbart had a dream job in a government space lab, but wanted to do something bigger.

Compared to the speed of development today, interactive computing at that time was only in its infancy. Computers are computational systems as big as the room and only allow one user at a time. People enter information through punch cards and wait for hours for answers. Interaction is something that belongs to the future, only in science fiction, but has begun to form in Engelbart's mind.

In his visualization, Engelbart sits in front of a large screen full of different icons, displaying information that can be organized and contacted. In 1960, he founded the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with the support of the US Air Force, NASA and the US Department of Defense.

The birth of computer mice and familiar clicks Picture 1
Douglas C. Engelbart and the first prototype mouse.

In December 1968, he made the tech world flutter when he presented a series of ideas before more than 1,000 of the world's leading computer scientists in the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

For more than an hour, he described how computers will interact, how information will be transmitted through video conferences, how people collaborate and work in groups as well as how to edit text. . Contrary to the mainframe computers of the time, the system that Dr. Engelbart created, called oLine System, allows scientists to share information throughout, can create and store documents in the form of an electrical library. structured death.

He also performed the mouse's activity, which he invented four years ago, in controlling computers. The idea of ​​the mouse occurred when Engelbart attended a computer graphics workshop and he thought it would be great to be able to move the cursor on the computer screen simply.

The first version of the mouse has a wooden case with 3 buttons because it only has enough room for 3 buttons, but Engelbart believes that there must be 10 buttons to perform all the functions. Two decades later, when equipped with mice for Macintosh computers, Steve Jobs, and Apple CEOs at the time, thought only one button was enough. He values ​​simplicity and asserts that a button helps avoid false manipulations rather than having a series of buttons.

Roger Bates, a hardware designer at SRI Institute, said the "mouse" name was given to match the name of the cursor. At that time, the cursor was called CAT (cat) but Mr. Bates could not remember what phrase the CAT stands for.

What Engelbart presented in 1968 painted the future of the computing era that was later developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. But it was not until the early 1980s of the last century that computer mice became the standard in computer control thanks to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM turning into commercial products and changing modern people's lives. Today, mouse clicks have become familiar with hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Engelbart was awarded many honors, in the Turing Award. He was also one of the first to see the impact of computers on the whole society.Engelbart died July 2 at the age of 88 in Atherton, California (USA).