Mouse - In the House

Mouse - In the House

Douglas Engelbart's death was announced on the news today. Well, who on earth is he you might ask? as you are working away making a new blip, using your PC or laptop, and more than likely using a mouse.

This man invented the mouse, which is now ubiquitous in most desktop PCs and something we now just take totally for granted. I can still remember my first mouse, using a Macintosh computer in 1987 with a WIMP GUI interface. It was breathtaking and groundbreaking stuff in those days. We never looked back after that, and now we have iPads and Tablets with touchscreen technology. The mouse has been technology 'leapfrogged' !

This is one of the many mice in our house, some technology based and most likely some organic!! It is modelled here by the lovely Lounardo - showing off her brand new Bangalore Bangles :)

For the Geeks out there:

Taken from Wikipedia (the Oracle)

Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 - July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.

Engelbart was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world's increasingly urgent and complex problems. Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab

Epiphany (Douglas Engelbart)

Engelbart's career was inspired in December 1950 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals other "than a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after." Over several months he reasoned that:

- he would focus his career on making the world a better place;
- any serious effort to make the world better requires some kind of organized effort;
- harnessing the collective human intellect of all the people contributing to effective solutions was the key;
- if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems - the sooner the better; and
computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.

In 1945, Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", a call to action for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge. He had also read something about the recent phenomenon of computers, and from his experience as a radar technician, he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen. He envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display "working stations", flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life's mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools.