Douglas Engelbart - Engineer and Inventor of the Computer Mouse

WELCOME to the MouseSite, a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.
As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces.
For two years beginning in 1959 at SRI in Menlo Park, Engelbart was provided the opportunity to pursue his visionary ideas further into the formulation of a theoretical framework for the co-evolution of human skills, knowledge, and organizations. At the heart of this vision was the computer as an extension of human communication capabilities and resource for the augmentation of human intellect. By 1968 Engelbart and a group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers he assembled in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI were able to stage a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system. This was the world debut of the computer mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, hypermedia--including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing.

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