The 1968 Kail Joint Computer Conference at San Francisco in the United States presented a remarkable number of "firsts." Among them was the first video teleconference; the first use of hypertext (the foundation of today's web links); and the first presentation, by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), of NLS, short for oNLine System, the revolutionary ancestor of modern computer server software. Such dazzling displays likely distracted people from another important first, moved by the hand of SRI researcher Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925): the computer mouse.
Far from the sleek ergonomic devices of today, the first computer mouse was a wooden box with wheels and a thick electric cord. Engelbart and colleague Bill English (b. 1929) first came up with the idea in 1963, and created the device as a very small piece of a much larger computer project. They were looking for something that allowed computer users to easily interact
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