The Forgotten Man Behind the Mouse
The little-known inventor behind the computer mouse
In 1960, Douglas Engelbart was an electrical engineering student at the Stanford Research Institute. He realised that the way people operated their new computers, with cumbersome keyboards and unwieldy joysticks, was deeply inefficient.
Engelbart developed a device that could control an on-screen cursor, named the bug, with two perpendicular wheels, connected to the computer using a wire. Nasa trialled his invention in 1966, concluding that its efficiency far surpassed that of alternative devices.
Two years later, Douglas introduced the mouse to a crowd of 1,000 in San Francisco, alongside co-inventor Bill English. The demonstration, which became known as ‘The Mother of All Demos’, was also the first to exhibit the operation of windows, hypertext and word processing as part of the all-in-one oN-Line System.
And yet, despite the significance of Engelbart and English’s demonstration, interest in the mouse rapidly fell away. Five years after the Mother of All Demos, English, along with most of Engelbart’s team, left the Research Institute to work for Xerox.
In 1979, Steve Jobs offered Xerox shares in his company in return for access to Xerox’s research, including their work on the mouse. Jobs’…
