Death of the father of the mouse (Douglas Engelbart 1925 – 2013)

Copyright © Françoise Herrmann Not so very long ago in the land of informatics, computers were commanded to do their computations by people conversant in  the language of the computer’s operating system… already a step removed from the computer’s assembly language… The computer screen was black and commands were input either in amber or green using DOS or UNIX syntax… The idea of a user-friendly graphics interface, covering up all the linear command-based prompts -  came later. And so did a device able to command the computer from the outside of the machine - called “a mouse”. The inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, just died, on July 2, 2013.   The mouse was called “a mouse” from the get go! It was made of wood, had wheels (respectively corresponding to X and Y coordinates) and a long cable…that looked like…  a tail!... It was invented in the 60s at SRI – the Stanford Research Institute-, patented in the 70s, and commercialized in the 80s by Steve Jobs, who put it all together with the developments of  graphic interfaces, in a single stroke of genius, called the Macintosh --the machine that still later would become known as the “fishbowl”!... Douglas Engelbart’s mouse patent (US 3,541 541) titled “X-Y POSITION INDICATOR FOR A DISPLAY SYSTEM” was granted on Nov 17,  1970, and assigned to SRI.  It was filed on June 21, 1967. This is means that by the time it was commercialized in the 80s, the patent had expired.  To date there are more than 2 billion mice that have been sold worldwide!... And of course, that’s probably enough since Steve Jobs took a second stride with the capacitive technology of touch screens in Iphones, now replacing the mouse and mouse pad…    Here is the abstract of Engelbart’s brilliant X-Y coordinated mouse patent, and a drawing of the work station of the 70s…  Abstract US 3541541 An X-Y position indicator control for movement by the hand over any surface to move a cursor over the display on a cathode ray tube, the indicator control generating signals indicating its position to cause a cursor to be displayed on the tube at the corresponding position. The indicator control mechanism contains X and Y position wheels mounted perpendicular to each other,  which rotate according to the X and Y movements of the mechanism, and which operate rheostats to send signals along a wire to a computer which controls the CRT display.                                                                         I suspect that my granddaughter will giggle when I tell her of the little mice that  used to turn pages, pick colors and draw rainbows… And I wonder what she will say…