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| Douglas Engelbart and his odd mouse contraption |
Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse, has died at the age of 88 in Mountain View California. In the 1950s and 60s, when mainframes took up entire rooms and were fed data on punch cards, Engelbart was envisioning a world in which people used computers to share ideas about solving problems. One of the biggest advances was the mouse, which he developed in the 1960s and patented in 1970. The contraption is made from a block of wood, a couple of gear wheels and a shiny, candy-like red light/button that just begs to be pushed. By December of 1968, Mr. Englebart had cobbled up a three-button mouse suitable for demonstration before a bemused audience at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The notion of operating the inside of a computer with a tool on the outside was way ahead of its time. The mouse wasn’t commercially available until 1984, with Apple’s new Macintosh. In fact, Engelbart’s invention was so early that he and his colleagues didn’t profit much from it. The mouse patent had a 17-year life span, and in 1987 the technology fell into the public domain – meaning Engelbart couldn’t collect royalties on the mouse when it was in its widest use. At least 1 billion have been sold since the mid-1980s.
