Today marks the 50th anniversary of ‘The Mother of All Demos’, presented by Douglas Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, known for creating the computer mouse.
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Their work laid the foundations that would shape modern computing: the mouse that consisted point-and-clicking, dragging-and-dropping, file editing, text messaging, hyperlinks, word processing, dynamic file linking, windows, graphical user interfaces etc.
Engelbart In 1963 began to receive funding for his own research laboratory, a lab he named the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute in California. Engelbart created the first prototype of the computer mouse in 1963. But it was Bill English, a colleague of Engelbart at the Standford Research Institute, who constructed the first prototype of the mouse using Engelbart’s sketches.
“We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids,” he wrote.
Engelbart was driven by a philosophy set out in his 1962 paper ‘Augmenting human intellect’ to optimise the efficiency of a working human being.
Now touch screens and gestures have become new interfaces to interact with computers and smartphones, despite that the mouse is still needed to operate the desktop and laptop. there can be no doubt as to the significance and impact of Engelbart’s contribution.
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