William English, who helped build the first computer mouse, has died at the age of 91. Mr. English built the first mouse in 1963, in collaboration with his colleague Doug Engelbart while they were working on at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).
Wood mouse
#/media/File:SRI_Computer_Mouse.jpg "First mouse")
The first version of the mouse was contained in a wood case. The mouse consisted of two potentiometers – rolling wheels at 90-degree angles that would interpret the wheels’ X and Y coordinates – vertical and horizontal positions – of the wheels as they moved across a desktop. Prior to the development of the mouse laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or manually set electronic switches were necessary to control computers. “We were working on text editing – the goal was a device that would be able to select characters and words,” Mr. English told the Computer History Museum in 1999.
Mr. English explained in an interview, that he could remember who decided the call the device “mouse” – or exactly why…
In the first report, we had to call it something. ‘A brown box with buttons’ didn’t work … It had to be a short name. It’s a very obvious short name.
The mother of all demos
D
uring 1968, in what some have described as “the mother of all demos” the mouse made its public debut. The mouse was a part of a demo by Mr. Engelbart, at a computer conference in San Francisco. He used SRI’s connection to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the primary precursor to the Internet to show off a working real-time collaborative computer system known as NLS (oN-Line System). Using NLS, the colleagues publicly demonstrated many of the technologies we take for granted today – video conferencing, multi-person document collaboration, screen-sharing and an early form of hypertext.
Mr. English left SRI in 1971, moving to Xerox’s PARC research center (PARC). At PARC, he continued to develop the features of the NLS into the Alto, including replacing the wheels on the original mouse design with a rolling ball – the design that became familiar to most end users over the next decades.
From here, the story is well known— Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both toured PARC, both saw the Alto, and implemented much of into their own products.
No money for the developers
Neither Mr. English nor Mr. Engelbart were made wealthy by their invention. The mouse was patented but owned by their employer – and the intellectual property rights expired in 1987 before the mouse became one of the most common tech devices on the planet. Speaking to the BBC after Mr. Engelbart’s death, Mr. English said:
The only money Doug ever got from it was a $50,000 license from Xerox when Xerox PARC started using the mouse … Apple never paid any money from it, and it took off from there.
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In 2008 Gartner declared the mouse is an endangered species with less than five years before it joins the ranks of the green screen, punch cards, and other computer technologies now honorably retired to technology museums but the market for Bill English’s computer mouse continues to grow.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
