Glossy 8.5 x 11 photo of a diagram for Engelbart's computer mouse patent issued in 1970, entitled "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System," signed in the lower right corner in black felt tip, "Doug Engelbart." In fine condition, with a minor bend to the upper left corner and small stain to right margin.
Computer visionary Douglas Engelbart is remembered for founding the field of human-computer interaction and for his development of the computer mouse. His original patent for an 'X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System' was filed in 1967 and introduced at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, the next year, in 'The Mother of All Demos.' In addition to being the first public demonstration of a computer mouse, Engelbart's presentation introduced several additional fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, word processing, dynamic file linking, and revision control.
The 'Mother of All Demos' would prove to be massively influential, though it took well over a decade for Engelbart's ideas to become mainstream. In the early 1970s, much of Engelbart's original team ended up at Xerox PARC, where they continued their research in human-computer interaction and kept improving upon the mouse. While touring Xerox PARC in 1979, Steve Jobs witnessed the concepts of the mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI) in action. Impressed by their user-friendliness, he aimed to simplify and incorporate these intuitive features into Apple's computers.
The Xerox mouses cost $300 apiece, didn't roll around smoothly, and had three buttons. Jobs wanted a simple, single-button model that cost $15. Apple licensed Engelbart's mouse patent from SRI for around $40,000, and Jobs hired the design firm IDEO to bring the mouse to the masses. Apple's mouse-which used a rollerball mechanism-was introduced with the expensive Lisa computer in 1983, but achieved fame and popularity when the more affordable Macintosh was released in 1984.
From the collection of Bill Daul, a longtime friend and colleague of Douglas Engelbart.
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