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
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
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.
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.
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.