Vintage Technology Throwback Thursday : First Computer Mouse

first computer mouse

The invention of the computer mouse and use the cathode-ray tube for the display of text, of graphics and of the mouse pointer (the monitor as we know it today) has revolutionized the world of computers today. Like many other Human Computer Interaction (HCI) visionaries, Engelbart wanted to augment human intellect. He imagined technology that would help deal with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.He has since helped develop networked computers, hypertext, email and word processing. Douglas saw the technology in computers as the answers to the problem of dealing with the ever more complex modern world and has dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing computer technology.

Douglas Engelbart is undoubtedly an outstanding visionary of his time, having ideas that seemed wild and far-fetched at the time but today are taken for granted. Engelbart is probably most known for his invention of the computer mouse, he developed it in the 1960’s, but it was not used commercially until the Apple Macintosh was introduced in 1984.

The research by Engelbart and his team laid to many innovations in computing and is now continuing in the development of an open hyperdocument system (OHS). As an intermediate step toward building the OHS, Engelbart has proposed the design for a hyperscope, a tool for browsing otherwise incompatible document types and facilitating linkages between them. The hyperscope would be built on top of the OHS’s hyperdocument architecture.

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