Question: origin of mouse
mathew
> Someone asked me a question this afternoon which I thought would
> make a good question here.
>
> I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
> of the Xerox Star computer (right?).
Wrong, I'm afraid. It was invented at SRI International's Augmentation Lab,
and used as one of the input devices for NLS (oN-Line System), which later
became known as AUGMENT. When the lab was closed in the early '70s, several
of its members went on to work at Xerox.
> If so, who designed this
> device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
The inventor was Douglas C. Engelbart, working at SRI in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was certainly called a "mouse" in Nelson's "Computer Lib", which makes
the phrase early seventies at the latest. As to who coined the phrase...
I dunno.
mathew.
[ Engelbart is also credited with inventing multiple overlapping windows,
and outline-processing. ]
--
Internet: mat...@mantis.co.uk / mathew%mantis...@ukc.ac.uk
UUCP: mat...@mantis.UUCP / ...!mcsun!ukc!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew
If you know anything significant about ISDN, please mail me...
Thomas Lapp
make a good question here.
I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
of the Xerox Star computer (right?). If so, who designed this
device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
- tom
--
internet : mvac23!tho...@udel.edu or thomas%mva...@udel.edu (home)
: 439...@mcimail.com (work)
uucp : {ucbvax,mcvax,psuvax1,uunet}!udel!mvac23!thomas
Location : Newark, DE, USA
Perspective : Another war has begun. And my heart is truly saddened at
the fact that there has been loss of life over the
inability of men to agree with one another. Sigh.
--
The UUCP Mailer
Evan Kirshenbaum
W. English, D. Englelbart, and M. Berman
Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation
IEEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics
v. 8, n. 1, March 1967, pp. 5-15
The description reads:
"The ``mouse'' was developed by SRI in connection with this research.
It is constructed from two potentiometers mounted orthognoally, each
of which has a wheel attached to its shaft (see Fig. 3 [a photo of a
*real* primative mouse --erk]). The mounting frame for the
potentiometers is enclosed in a 2 inch X 3 inch X 4 inch wooden
case....A switch mounted on the case is used for the select function"
Evan Kirshenbaum
HP Laboratories
3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Matthias Ulrich Neeracher
Lapp) writes:
> Someone asked me a question this afternoon which I thought would
> make a good question here.
>
> I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
> of the Xerox Star computer (right?). If so, who designed this
> device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
I don't think the mouse was invented at Xerox. I vaguely remember having
read somewhere it was invented in the early 60ies (?) at Stanford (?) by
somebody called Engelbart (???), who coined theword "mouse".
Matthias
-----
Matthias Neeracher mnee...@iiic.ethz.ch
"These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can
even aspire to crudeness." -- William Gibson, _Johnny Mnemonic_
Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879
by tho...@mvac23.UUCP (Thomas Lapp):
>
> I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
> of the Xerox Star computer (right?).
No. That came later. We had home-made mice attached to our DDP 516
workstations in room 2D-518 at Bell Labs Murray Hill in the summer of
1973, and the people there got the idea from SRI. We may well have
built the first modern LANs to connect a file-server and compute
server with a cluster of workstations.
Doug Jones
jo...@cs.uiowa.edu
Jakob Nielsen
writes:
>I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
>of the Xerox Star computer (right?). If so, who designed this
>device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
No, the mouse was invented in 1964 by Doug Engelbart at SRI.
He writes (in A. Goldberg (Ed.), "A History of Personal Workstations" p. 196):
"No one is quite sure why it got named a 'mouse', or who first started using
that name. None of us would have thought that the name would have stayed with
it out into the world, but the thing that none of us would have believed either
was how long it would take for it to find its way out there".
Steve Savitzky
Someone asked me a question this afternoon which I thought would
make a good question here.
I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
of the Xerox Star computer (right?). If so, who designed this
device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
Wrong. The mouse was invented in the early 60's by Doug Engelbart at
SRI (as part of the the NLS project, essentially a hypertext system
and similar in many ways to today's "outliner" products). The term
"mouse" came in at approximately the same time, because it looks like
one. It was originally used with a 5-key "keyset" in the left
hand--you pointed with the mouse (using its buttons for shift keys)
and entered text and commands with the keyset.
Alan Kay at Xerox PARC picked up the idea in '69 (or thereabouts) for
use with the "Alto" (the first workstation), and Smalltalk (the first
fully object-oriented language). The Alto and Smalltalk supported the
first windowing system with overlapping windows. The Star was an
attempt to commercialize the Alto.
--
\ --Steve Savitzky-- \ ADVANsoft Research Corp \ REAL hackers use an AXE! \
\ st...@advansoft.COM \ 4301 Great America Pkwy \ #include<disclaimer.h> \
\ arc!st...@apple.COM \ Santa Clara, CA 95954 \ 408-727-3357 \
\__ st...@arc.UUCP _________________________________________________________
Steve Lamont
>In article <436.UUL1.3#51...@mvac23.UUCP> tho...@mvac23.UUCP (Thomas Lapp) writes:
> I think that the computer mouse was invented at Xerox PARC as part
> of the Xerox Star computer (right?). If so, who designed this
> device, and who first coined the work "mouse" to describe it?
>
>Wrong. The mouse was invented in the early 60's by Doug Engelbart at
>SRI (as part of the the NLS project, essentially a hypertext system
Not to disagree with my learned collegues, but didn't Ivan Sutherland's Ph.D
dissertation back in about 1960 presage a number of workstation developments,
including the mouse? Don't know if it was called a mouse in the dissertation
but it seems to me that a mouse-like device was part of the system that he
described.
Can anyone confirm or refute this?
spl (the p stands for
presage, now there's a
word for ya...)
--
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (408) 646-2572 -- a guest at network.ucsd.edu --
NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943
"Unix is not a "A-ha" experience, it is more of a "holy-shit" experience."
- Colin McFadyen in alt.folklore.computers
Arthur Evans
Following up on a thread about when the mouse was invented, Steve Lamont
(sla...@network.ucsd.edu) writes
> didn't Ivan Sutherland's Ph.D dissertation back in about 1960 presage
> a number of workstation developments, including the mouse? Don't know
> if it was called a mouse in the dissertation but it seems to me that a
> mouse-like device was part of the system that he described.
Ivan's PhD research did, in fact, result in much of what has come to be
called coputer graphics. The work was performed on the TX-2 computer at
MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. However, there
was no mouse. Well, to be more restrained in my claims, there were no
mice on TX-2 during the time I used that machine, about 1970 to 1975.
There were light pens and other such gadgets for moving a cursor on a
screen, but I remember nothing mouse-like.
Art Evans
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University