Douglas Englebart’s mouse lives on even after his passing

For an innocuous-looking, rolling thingamajig the size of a deck of cards, the computer mouse certainly has gone far (even if typically tethered on a wire, rarely more than a foot away from its computer).

It certainly is not the most intuitive or obvious device – at least at first try and first glance – especially when you look at the boxy, wood prototypes created by mouse inventor Douglas Englebart, who died last week at the age of 88.

Englebart was a true Silicon Valley pioneer, spending most of this life working in the Valley and helping think up some of the most important innovations underlying the way we interact and work with computers today.

Although best known for the really quite extraordinary idea that a rolling device held in one hand could be a superior way to work on a computer screen – when the keyboard was king – Englebart was also involved with the creation of hypertext (interactive, linked text, which now under- lies the way we move by embedded link, through the web), collaboration over shared screens, dynamic file linking and more.

All of this he demonstrated in 1968 – long before the PC and the internet, much less the web – in a 90 minute presentation, made with fellow researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California.

There’s a fantastic stream of the entire presentation at sloan.stanford.edu/mouse site/1968Demo.html, in which Englebart suggests viewers think about the then- amazing notion “if you had a workstation at your disposal all day that was perfectly responsible . . . or responsive”.

You can also view smaller snippets that have been reformatted in Flash, if you want to focus on on a specific element of the talk, such as his demonstration of the mouse (see clip 12).

Why “mouse”? “I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,” Englebart explained.

It was about another two decades before the mouse began to be shipped with a tiny handful of computers – notably, Apple Macs.

I remember well my own first encounter with this seemingly odd device. I had been using PCs for a couple of years at that point and was quite used to the keyboard and screen with blinking cursor, the basic tools of the command line interface (think: words on a screen, generally luminous green or orange on black, in retro hacker movies where computers make noises they never make in real life).

I was quite proud of how adept I’d become at using the WordStar word processing programme, having memorised the commands you needed to type to, say, set a word into italics, or – exciting stuff here – centre the title of an essay.

A friend invited me down to try this new thing called the Mac in the computer science department at Trinity College. I recall being wowed by the screen – the essay on the screen looked like a real page! And real fonts! Black print on a white page – wonderful!

The friend sat me down in front of the little boxy Mac and told me to forget the up and down keys on the keyboard – instead, I was to hold that “mouse” thing and roll it.

I rolled. The cursor moved. How utterly cool. I rolled some more. And some more. I tried to roll to the top of the page and was by now splayed across the desk and out of desktop, having rolled that mouse to the very edge of the desk.

The computer friends were in stitches.

“You just have to lift it up and set it down again as you roll. You don’t have to retain contact with the desk.”

Oh.

Thus began my love affair with the mouse and the Mac. Mainstream PCs wouldn’t have mice for years yet, and the mouse became a major dividing element between Macs and PCs. Later, the right- click button on the PC mouse would be seen as a defining, superior element of the PC versus the Mac, for PC fans.

Of course, kids these days have happily bypassed the mouse. My nephew, now nine, barely lingered in the mouse world before easily leaping on to the touchscreen interface of the iPad, iPhone and now countless tablets and smartphones (far more intuitive to use than the mouse).

For a five-year-old, touch rules. In her world, the mouse might already seem an amusing relic of the bygone tech past, like dot matrix printers, the command line interface and the boingy-boingy noise a modem once upon a time made as it did an auditory “handshake” across the copper phone wires.

But I don’t think the mouse is about to vanish any time soon. Englebart’s invention is still so useful and really, it lives on.

Rest in peace, Douglas Englebart – and thanks for giving me, in your little mouse, such an easy way into the whole extraordinary world of computing and the web.