Contents page 1 — the mouse page 2 — “this is The Biggest, this is revolutionary!” Page 3 — Welcome to the Post-WIMP era On a page
On 9 read. December 1968 entered Douglas Engelbart the stage. 100 minutes later, the audience of the fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco with a standing ovation, celebrated him, impressed by what it had just seen. But without knowing the significance. In his lecture, – “the mother of all Demos” – presented Engelbart with several groundbreaking developments in the history of computing, including Software-Windows, Hyperlinks, video conferencing, and the computer mouse.
50 years later, no one is more surprised about this handy device. Day-to-day, you take a billion people in the Hand. You grab, drag, click. She is too dirty or breaks, there is a new one. The mouse is replaceable, and yet irreplaceable. Because until today, she is one of the easiest ways to communicate with machines.
Without the invention of the mouse, many developments would have been hard to imagine. PCs, operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, Software from word processing to Games: All of this would look probably different. But so successful has been the computer mouse is also slow extinction. The first people to grow up without a mouse, have long been born. This has met Douglas Engel Bart’s Vision more than the “extension of the human intellect,” as he wrote in 1962.
of The Computer, The computers of that time were as a solution for problems that don’t exist yet
barely more than electrical computing machines. Engelbart, however, had bigger plans: in 2013, a deceased electrical engineer looked at the Computer of the future communicate with the people, as a solution for problems that don’t exist yet. “Engelbart was one of the few people who understood that computers can not only do many familiar things, but allow us to think differently and better,” said his late companion, the computer scientist Alan Kay, a few years ago in an interview with the technology website The Register. For Engelbart, the also meant to rethink the Computer, to make it literally more tangible.
the end of the fifty years began Engelbart, his work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. At the time of the interaction with computer screens with the use of expensive Light-Pens, which was on a tube screen. Angel’s Vision was not a solution, which is why he worked from 1961 to an Alternative. With his colleague Bill English, he built the first prototype in 1964, the computer mouse as we know it today – the German company Telefunken, however, took in 1967, with your trackball, at least, the principle of the Trackball anticipated and has therefore earned a footnote in this story.
Proto-mouse, the SRI is a chunky block of wood, in the two orthogonal-mounted, wheels were in, a axis for the Position of the X-axis and one for Y. From both values, the Position could be calculated on a screen. On the top is a single button was, and with the outstanding cable you looked, if you squinted, really like a mouse. “Sometimes I apologize for the fact that we have changed the name, never,” said Engelbart during the presentation. You may also see the charm of the device but The mouse was already from the name of a mass-suitable concept.
his mouse, had to make Engelbart and his Team not only the Hardware but also the Software. The result could be the “mother of all Demos” marvel: The so-called online System (NLS), the Engelbart, in 1968, introduced, was one of the first collaborative computer systems: Its users were able to independently access each other, texts from different programs to combine, and serve her on a graphical user interface. It is the beginning of the WIMP-age (“windows, icons, menus, pointer”), how this human-machine interface, also called.
