Innovation: Who Made That Mouse?

Engelbart had always been good at solving mechanical problems. When he was 13, his neighbor had an old Ford sitting in his barn, his daughter Christina told me. “My dad got it running again,” she said. “A car in those days — you used the steering wheel, a choke and both of your feet on the pedals. Your whole body was involved.” (Her father, now 88, is no longer giving interviews.)

Engelbart wanted to give people the same kind of physical control over a computer. In 1963, he began a series of experiments at his lab at the Stanford Research Institute, placing subjects in front of a monitor that looked like a 1950s TV set. The screen, as round as a porthole, displayed flickering words. Various devices were used to move the cursor — to correct an error or add a sentence — requiring so much new technology that the workstation cost about $100,000. Engelbart even rigged a helmet-mounted pointer that let you move the cursor with a nod of your head, but users found it awkward. In the end, the best cursor-control device turned out to be a box on wheels that you rolled around the desk like a toy car, which Engelbart designed himself.

The researchers in his lab nicknamed this device the mouse. “It was just what they called it affectionately,” Christina Engelbart said. Her father thought the name sounded unprofessional, so he christened it the “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” But with its wire tail and way of scampering across the desk, the gizmo was born cute. The name stuck.

MOUSEKETEER

Bill English, an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute lab in the ’60s, was instrumental in the design of the first mouse.

In Doug Engelbart’s lab, you also tried out a knee-operated pointer, right? Oh, yes, the knee pointer, in terms of functionality, turned out to be second only to the mouse.

The knee? Who knew? The knee can be a good controller. You’re rotating your foot, so you can precisely move the cursor to the left or right, up and down. But of course it was impractical, because the device had to be built to fit the person who operated it.

What kind of design considerations went into the mouse? One of the fundamental things you had to decide was the ratio of mouse movement to the movement of the cursor on the screen. I remember sitting there playing with a box on my desk and thinking, How far would I be willing to move my hand to make the cursor move across a line of text? That’s how I got a feel for how big the wheel ought to be.

So you had to figure out what kind of hand gestures would be ideal for moving the cursor? Yeah, I just moved a box around the desk and thought, That feels about right.

Are we still using the same kind of hand movements? Well, let’s see. I’m sitting here at my screen right now and moving my mouse. Yeah, it’s pretty much the same as the original one.