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The man who built a better mouse trap

Michael Kanellos CNET News

Published: 18 Sep 2003 16:50 BST

Doug Engelbart doesn't come across as a "mad scientist" type. The 78-year-old engineer seems more like the type of person who votes in every election and would walk three blocks rather than park nearby and partially obstruct someone's driveway.

But for more than two decades, the man who invented the computer mouse was often confined to the scientific fringe.

In 1951, Engelbart first came up with the idea of using a manual device to manipulate data on a computer. During World War II, he learned that the scale and other aspects of radar displays could be controlled by hand, and he figured the same techniques could be applied to computer displays. He suggested pursuing research on the topic while working at Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (the NASA Ames Research Centre) and later, as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Everyone -- for at least 10 years -- thought I was totally crazy," Engelbart said in an interview last week, during a press event held by Logitech to mark the Swiss company's shipment of its 500 millionth mouse.

Subsequently, Engelbart took a position at SRI International (then known as the Stanford Research Institute). "I was told not to talk about it," he said in the interview. Instead, he worked on a computer made from magnetic cores, a project that has vanished in the mists of time.

Finally, his research group at SRI obtained a grant from Nasa in 1963 to study interactive devices for displays. Of the eight or nine different devices the group studied -- pointers, joysticks, trackballs -- a brown, wooden box with two rolling wheels and a red push button on top achieved the best results.

"No one remembers who suggested the name, but we all started calling it the 'mouse,'" Engelbart recalled.