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
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?
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
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'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.
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.
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?
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
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.
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
Mouse
Web-board
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers
Using the blink tag since 1200bc.. and we still haven't learned from our mistakes =)
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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.
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.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Too bad he didn't demo one-click shopping too.
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
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.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Lans also invented color graphics and satellite navigation.
OK, I admit, I am bored...
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.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
lynx -dump pnm://vodreal.stanford.edu/Engel/12Engel200.rm > ~/12Engel200.rm
________________
They're - They are
Their - Belonging to them
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
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
...is why the hell did they decide to call it a "mouse"?
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.
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
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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. . .
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
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
-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.