Slashdot Mirror
The First Mouse
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.
"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", 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.
This man is truly a god and it just pisses me off thinking that some other clown gets all the attention because he can use his great marketing clout to rip off the public.
What sad times are these.
Vote Nader
Don't learn from your mistakes, do you? :) I assume you mean the <BLINK> tag?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
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
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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?
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
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...
Which is good, because before that nobody could use the first Walkman (invented in India in the 5th century BC).
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.
-Kriticism
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
Chord keyboards do exist.
Check this link out http://www.nanopac.com/Keyboard.htm
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...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
There were even a few before Vannevar Bush (not to take anything away from Van).
H.G. Wells 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 at Michael Buckland's site, or a brief mention in Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto
In addition to solving legal problems such as silly patents, keeping detailed records on anything neat you do also has the benefit of helping you understand (or even remember) what you did months or years later! Over time, most of us have probably had some really cool ideas that have fallen by the wayside due to other commitments or the fact that technology wasn't "there" yet. Having notes and actually going through then from time to time can remind you of forgotten projects that may suddenly be applicable today.
all three are needed for popular success.
Invention is the idea.
Innovation is filling the market need.
Marketing is telling the market about it.
Englebart is truly a visionary and lauded figure in Computer Science history, but his ideas were just that, ideas given prototype form. The actual innovations occurred latter at Xerox PARC, then Apple, and eventually Microsoft.
-Stu
My title is the correct quote, and it's very old. Unfortunately, I think "the good is the enemy of the great" (i.e., the reverse of the true quote) is a much cleverer statement than the correct quote. That puts you in a tough position: do you want to say something that's cleverer or more correct?
The reversed form of the quote is far more popular, too, so I'm not the only one who feels that way. "The good is the enemy of the great" means that something that is good enough unfortunately removes the incentive to change to something better.
Lots of technologies follow this pattern. Something better is invented but never gets adopted because something well established is good enough that it's not worth all the trouble to make the change.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Now Thats name dropping if ive ever herd
OK I checked and it's 'CDI' - Computer Displays Inc. - I have SN #4. I think it was about 1972 that I bought this but it'd take some time with a fortune teller to get the real date out of me.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
See this interview 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 and the items at his site is a must read for anyone interested in the field of computing and man-machine interfaces.
The link to the first mouse video points to pnm://vodreal.stanford.edu/Engel/12Engel200.rm
Why can't I save it locally for another view while I'm offline? I don't want to stream it; I want to download it! Any ideas?
Wasn't it originally referred to as a "x-y interpolator?"
-Vel
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't the trackball invented before the mouse, in Canada, and used for aiming large guns?
The Apple, MS and Logitech optical mice are ALL using the same technology developed by HP (which may have wound up in the Aligent spin off, who knows)
He's talking about optical mice that had to use special mousepads with a grid of lines. The new crop of optical mice can be used on nearly any surface. I don't think there are any new ones, but there are lots of used computer parts floating around. I saw a box full of the pads a week ago here in Seattle. Try local used computer stores.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You mean 'interpolatrix'
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
if it hadn't been slashdotted i'd have seen that ;)
thanks!
'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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I suspect it is because "better is the enemy of good enough", as Jerry Pournelle says
I'm not really sure what Jerry Pournelle says, but I'm pretty sure the correct saying is "Best is the enemy of better." It's basically saying that because you tried to get something perfect, you ended up with nothing at all. Either way, doesn't really apply here - I think chording keyboards don't catch on because there is too much memorization required.
If you work in X it can be very difficult to create an environement that is all keyboard-controllable - and impossible to achieve consistency. This is an issue for people with arthritis, rsi, or injuries/disabilities that make mouse use very uncomfortable.
Mouse
Web-board
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
Intro theme song and closing credits. Anyone know where episodes can be downloaded online? (This is slashdot -- to hell with copyright.)
Using the blink tag since 1200bc.. and we still haven't learned from our mistakes =)
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
sacrelige!
everybody knows Steve Jobs invented the mouse! as well as the gui, colorful computers, nuclear fission, the steam engine, the light bulb, the abacus, gunpowder, water, gravity, and the concept of time itself.
right!? keep your facts straight!
Anyone knows if it's possible to hack a Sun mouse to plug it into a PC?
Ni!
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"
Guttermouth is a really good band.
Doug Engelbart invented the first _mouse_ in 1964 (at stanford research institute). However, this mouse could only move in Either x or y. The first person to develop a mouse that used both axis was a dude called Håkan Lans. Houston Instruments started manufacturing it and then apple bought the rights. He is also the man behind STDMA/ADS-B.
So we know that technological advancement was dog slow, and that advancements are usually ignored for a long, long time... anything else?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Hey, I didn't think video's were around back then!!
www.s11.org ---- see police thugs in Australia!
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.
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Too bad he didn't demo one-click shopping too.
I dunno. Maybe cause it looked like one? (more like a rat) With the long tail coming out of the back of the mouse (watch the demo video) and the buttons in front maybe looking like ears, and all this combining to give the impression of a mouse to whoever invented it.
(second hyothesis: whoever invented such a device must have been smoking some strong stuff. God knows what they must have been thinking...)
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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 Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One of the more interesting "millenial" magazine issues was that of the Economist, which gave a 200-page history of the last 1000 years. The basic theme for the entire technology section was "The Europeans then invented such-and-such (200 years after it's first use in China)"
I'm working on inventing the color red, I should be finished any day now, then I'll copyright it. See anything yet?
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
doh!
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.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Lans also invented color graphics and satellite navigation.
OK, I admit, I am bored...
Engelbart's mouse used two slanted wheels on the underside: one for X and one for Y. I have only seen this type of mouse used with old, slow DEC Ultrix systems I used in college. These machines were replaced not long after I started going there.
Lans's device was more of a digitizer tablet. I believe it used induction and that the active device was the tablet itself.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
er, what about pinky and the brain? now there's a real geek (the brain of course)
Stupid Cheap Guitars
A friend who attended a reunion of SRI old-timers once told me a story about the first meeting between Doug Engelbart and Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse and founder of Mouse Systems, which for years OEMed the infrared mice that shipped with Sun workstations.
Kirsch is said to have asked Englebart, "Is it true that you never made a dime from your invention of the mouse?" When Englebart replied in the affirmative, Kirsch allegedly reached into his pocket, pulled out a dime, and gave it to Englebart.
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."
"And like that
all i would like to say is that i'm _quite_ happy to be related (even if by blood only) to doug englebart.. he's done quite a bit to further user and interface fluidity.
your mom!
The first mouse was constructed out of wood (yes, WOOD; how archaic). The ball, sensors, and buttons were basically the same.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
You mean "dangermouse, powerhouse, he's the fastest, he's the quickest he's the best?" It was my favourite cartoon growing up here in Pennsylvania.. I loved Pentho as well. "Oh Crumbs. Oh 'eck" still gets me to this day. And Grovel. Who can forget grovel? It's about the only think that kept me from speaking our local dialect when I was little. Why? because I found out people speak differently no matter where you go. The internet did a similar service to my spelling.
Lowmag.net
From the Jargon File, v. 4.2.2:
I've never heard anything about this being the "official" terminology. I certainly hope the disney part doesn't become a reality.where there's fish, there's cats
Oh man... I forgot Pinky and the Brain! Someone should mod me down for that.
Then perhaps you should add a question mark to the new shoes subject line?
Behold the Open Source Sloth...
Slow moving marsupials and the women that love them
Next time, on Geraldo...
...is why the hell did they decide to call it a "mouse"?
Ok, this is my area of expertise.
- Engelbart made his mouse out of a block of wood and some potentiometer-like controls for wheels, with the help of a hardware guru. This currently sits in a Logitech conference room.
- Steve Kirsch's Mouse Systems created the original optical mouse, 1st customer: Sun Microsystems. Xerox had an experimental model out a bit earlier as well.
- Microsoft got their mouse from Alps originally.
-Apple got their mechanical mouse from Logitech.
- Mouse Systems invented the wheel mouse, called first PC Mouse 3D/6D, then renamed ProAgio in the early 90's. Microsoft copied it, was sued, and now licenses it quietly. (very quietly!)
(oops, gotta finish quickly now. I've got that premonition that Windows is about to crash.)
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.
As a heterosexual male who doesn`t give a damn what other people are up to in THEIR lives - I don`t mind if you`re gay or straight (I just don`t want big wet kisses off another bloke !) If you`re so anti-homosexual, just be glad that theres less competition for the women desperate enough to want to sleep with such a twisted man(?) as yourself. (Most "men" are comfortable enough with their sexuality not to have to comment on others) Live your life, and let others live theirs. They don`t necessarily want (or deserve) your opinions - as i`m sure you would object if they forced their opinions on you. I`m guessing you`re the type of twisted individual who would prefer anyone who thinks or acts differently to you to be put on an island somewhere, or shot.
as I picture a boy and girl sitting on top of the mouse in 19th century clothing, him in his slacks and suit coat and hat, her in her summer dress, with the umbrella that matches, him with his acoustic guitar singing to her, out on the mousepad for a sunday afternoon outing...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I never claimed to be all that bright... but the comment would have been a lot funnier if he was (God rest his living soul).
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Perhaps we have just grown up in the past few decades and not realized it, while computers have gotten proportionally smaller.
Just an idea...
Got Rhinos?
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
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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. . .
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The only reason the Chinese didn't take over was because the Emperor was a reactionary. He took the nations inventors and, well... introduced reasons to not invent.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
--
Imagine, if you will, a world divided into two camps, a Windows camp and a Linux camp. If you were interviewing a candidate for a system administrator, who do you think would do a better job on your Linux box, someone who owns a Linux box, or someone who plays with one about 15 minute a week. Right, the familiarity with the breeds greater fluency and pleasure.
Imagine, if you will, you just spent $500 on a new Athlon procesor. What reaction would you prefer?
Imagine this, you accidentally leave your Linux server at the # sign, and some 3 year old carpet ape types rm -rf *.
Dang, why did you procreate!
With a heterosexual union, you will have children, no matter what your woman says, they're biologically determined to breed. That's why hets' are called breeders.
If you have a homo stud for a SO, no kids.
I think I've made myself perfectly clear.
That'd be a neat trick, since Doug is still alive. As are most of the people who worked with him. Here's Doug's home page if you want to see what he's been up to lately:
http://www.bootstrap.org/
(Doug worked for my dad at SRI.)
I play Nerd-Folk!
You can knock something for six, or blow something out of the water but you don't knock something out of the water.
Bah! who cares! This is America, land of the free, home of the braves! or the other way around...
Here, applying for a patent is enough to get it, even if your patent is ridiculous or the information is already old. Then you can sue other legitimate companies because you have a patent. If they want to win they have to prove to a bunch of old computer-illiterate fools that your patent is shit.
You have the patent. You hold the power. They are presumed guilty until they can prove they are innocent.
So come to America! Air-in-a-can might already be patented, but there are countless other things to "invent"... Here's an idea: patent the trading of Pokemon cards! That'll make you rich fast!
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.
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
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.
The most interesting history lesson this should teach the /kiddies is that some of the things you think are 'new' really are not.
Atomic theory was proposed in the 300's BC by Democritus, a Hellenic philosopher.
Steam power was proposed in 100 BC as a way to open the doors of an Egyptian temple by simply lighting a fire to awe the masses, but the priests said, 'We have slaves to do that!'
There is evidence that the first battery was used in 100's AD Iraq to heal people's ailments.
Oh yeah... Ancient Hellenic philosophers also proposed (and PROVED) a heliocentric solar system which was accepted until the Christian religion screwed science.
And don't forget the Colossus of Rhodes.. the Pyramids.. and other ancient structures which we scratch our heads to figure out.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.