In summation, Douglas Engelbart was a very intelligent man who cleverly came up with the idea of the mouse. The mouse was a huge invention for today’s modern society. Without the mouse we would not have an accurate input pointing device. The mouse is what helps us control our computer and give it the information it needs to function accordingly. The mouse was necessary in order for computer’s to be bought by Americans. The mouse was a block of wood carved in a square shape. The mouse had a bunch of cords coming out of the back (see pictures) but there was one thick man cord that stood out. This is how the mouse got its name, the wood was the body and the cord was the tail. Engelbart’s group also called the pointer the “bug” but this name wasn’t widely adopted.

Facts

• While running tests for the first mouse, Mr. Engelbart and Bill English were also running test on a form of the mouse controlled by the knee. But the mouse "beat out" the device controlled by the knee but only by a small margin.
• The invention of the mouse was "a result of analyzing the various characteristics of other pointing/input devices" as Douglas Engelbart said in an interview.
• Engelbart himself didn't patent the mouse, SRI (Stanford Research Institute) patented it and then sold it to Apple for a measly $40,000.00
• The mouse's motions typically translate into a pointer (unless changed by the user) which allows for fine motions in Graphical User Interface

More on Douglas Engelbart and the mouse!

Mr. Engelbart

Mr. Engelbart worked on the mouse with Bill English, a scientist at SRI. While, Mr. Engelbart was a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute. Mr. Engelbart says that Bill English is the one who actually built the mouse, though they both thought of the idea together.


The First Mouse!

The first mouse was carved out of wood and motion was tracked by two wheels on the bottom. The first mouse resembled the real rodent because of the "body" and the cord coming out the bottom, which look like a tail. The scientists inventing the mouse, nicknamed it that while developing this vital object in the lab, and the name stuck.

About Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart invented or contributed to the modern computer's mouse, computer video teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, email, and the Internet. Douglas Engelbart has 45 patents to his name, the above are just a few. Mr. Engelbart dedicated a lot of his time to creating and contributing ideas to the Online System (NLS). This is a hypermedia groupware system. In an experimental video-conference at the Fall Join Computer Conference in San Diego, Engelbart got a standing ovation for the new technological devices that he and a few of his colleagues had worked hard to perfect. Most of Engelbart's accomplishments were involved with the NLS, because he spent most of his time perfecting this. For all of these inventions and contributions to the world of computers, Mr. Engelbart received the 1997 Lemelson-MIT Prize of $500,000. Then, in 1998 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Douglas Engelbart now owns the Bootstrap, Inc. and that is where he proceeds to work.