43rd anniversary of the “mother of all demos,” first mouse

It has been dubbed the “Mother of all demos” but it was way more than that.  On December 9, 1968 Douglas Engelbart stepped to the podium at what was called the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and showed off the world’s first mouse, but also introduced hypertext links, on-screen text editing, video teleconferencing, windowing and a variety of other computing concepts years ahead of their time. 

Engelbart showed off his futuristic NLS, or the “oN-Line System”, which was the first to implement all of these technologies.

Read more: Celebrating the birthplace of the Internet in pictures

An interesting article penned in 2008 by the IDG News Service about the celebration of the 40^th anniversary of the NLS demo stated: Those who saw the original demo and understood Engelbart’s vision were blown away. “My heart was in my mouth the whole time,” remembers Tom Hagan, CEO of Actioneer. Two years later, the company he worked for had bought Computer Displays Inc., the company that sold the first mouse, as part of its ARDS (Advanced Remote Display System) computer.  Hagan had the world’s first commercially produced mouse on hand and was showing it to all comers during a break at the Stanford event. Beige and clunky, with three ergonomically unfriendly buttons, it was about the size of five iPhones. On the back: CDI Serial Number 001.

In a BBC interview in 2001, Engelbart said of the first mouse: “We had a big heavy tracking ball, it was like a cannonball. We had several gadgets that ended up with pivots you could move around. We had a light panel you had to hold up right next to the screen so the computer could see it. And a joystick that you wiggle around to try to steer things.”  In the end, the mouse won all the tests for speed and accuracy. At the time it was called an x-y position indicator. “One of the members of the team nicknamed the device a mouse and it caught on. We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name, but it didn’t.”

More from the IDG News Service piece:

Engelbart’s work was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense, but not everyone bought into his vision of computing, panelists at the 2008 celebration said. “One of the things that Doug really gets credit for is persisting in spite of the fact that 90% of the people thought he was a crackpot,” said Bill Paxton, a researcher with the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was on the 1968 demo team.

Another audience member for the 1968 demo said that the computer industry, with its incompatible file formats, will probably never manage to achieve the vision laid out by Engelbart. “This vision hasn’t really been realized in today’s environment,” said Andries van Dam, a Brown University professor of computer science. “We can do a lot of the individual things that are done in this system better … but they don’t work together.”

Even the anarchic, highly collaborative world of Web 2.0 probably won’t measure up, he added. “I think the architecture that was defined by these wizards, and the head wizard especially, beats any amount of bottom-up tinkering and mashing up,” he said. “It’s that lack of principled architecture that I really regret at this point.”

Read more: 25 tech touchstones of the past 25 years

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