A working version of how everyone now uses a computer. At a conference in San Francisco in December 1968, Engelbart showed , the oN-Line System, a real-time collaborative computer system. Before his inventions, controlling a computer meant laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or manually set switches, and data had to be printed before anyone could look at it.
The mouse was only one piece. He invented it in 1963 or 1964 as part of an experiment to find a better way to point and click on a display screen, with a carved wood casing and a single button. His also produced the multiple-window display and , the linking of texts, images, video and sound within one document.
Douglas Engelbart had the inspiration that drove the rest of his career in December 1950, while dissatisfied with an electrical engineering job. His dream was to use computers to connect individuals in a network that would let them share and update information in real time. He combined that idea of collaborative software with his experience interpreting radar displays and with Vannevar Bush’s article "As We May Think".
After a doctorate at Berkeley in 1955 he joined the Stanford Research Institute, and in 1963 SRI partially funded his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center. There he worked on inventing and perfecting devices for inputting, manipulating and displaying data, among them the , the multiple-window display and hypermedia. With William English he also perfected joysticks, light pens and track balls.
The mouse itself came in 1963 or 1964, from an experiment to find a better way to point and click on a display screen. The first one had a carved wood casing and a single button. A subsequent model had three, and Engelbart would have provided more if there had been room for more than the three microswitches the buttons connected to.
Early in 1967 his laboratory became the second site on the ARPANET, the primary precursor to the Internet. Then at a computer conference in San Francisco, on the ninth of December 1968, he showed NLS: a working real-time collaborative computer system. The contrast is what makes the date striking. Before his inventions, laborious and error-prone keypunch cards or manually set switches were needed to control a computer, and data had to be printed before anyone could view it. One caution: an encyclopedia biography credits one person for work that involved a laboratory.
wat. In 1968 he showed a room full of people the computer they would all be using decades later.
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His work made it possible for ordinary people to use computers. The list of what he was demonstrating in 1968 reads as a description of an ordinary working day sixty years later.
How do we know?
Britannica’s biography of Engelbart gives the date and setting of the 1968 event, the system shown, the inventions that preceded it, and what controlling a computer required beforehand.
What is still unknown
An encyclopedia biography, which credits an individual for developments involving many people. It names his colleague William English on the input devices but is necessarily compressed about who did what.
Learn something?
Where to next
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