The 1968 Kail Joint Computer Conference at San Francisco in the United States presented a remarkable number of "firsts." Among them was the first video teleconference; the first use of hypertext (the foundation of today's web links); and the first presentation, by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), of NLS, short for oNLine System, the revolutionary ancestor of modern computer server software. Such dazzling displays likely distracted people from another important first, moved by the hand of SRI researcher Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925): the computer mouse.
Far from the sleek ergonomic devices of today, the first computer mouse was a wooden box with wheels and a thick electric cord. Engelbart and colleague Bill English (b. 1929) first came up with the idea in 1963, and created the device as a very small piece of a much larger computer project. They were looking for something that allowed computer users to easily interact with computers. The first prototype had a cord to the front, but this was so cumbersome it was moved to the back, becoming a "tail," which gave rise to the device's name. "It just looked like a mouse with a tail, and so we called it that in the lab," commented Engelbart.
Neither Engelbart, English, nor SRI ever marketed the mouse. The next lab to work on it, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), gave it some modern touches but failed to bring it to the masses. That job was done by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, Inc., in the 1980s. Jobs's company polished up the mouse, making it affordable, available, and an integral part of the personal computer. Apple may have made the mouse famous, but Engelbart and English were there first.
