One of the key figures in the development of personal computing was Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart never got rich because he developed some of the innovations that transformed the computer from a hidden tool in the inner sanctuary of computer centres into a desktop object capable of supporting any activity from play to work. He was a shy and humble man. It was his invention of the mouse, patented by his research institute and then sold to Apple for $40,000, without having the slightest idea of the inestimable value of the artefact.
Invented by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, the mouse was born as a square wooden box, slightly larger than it is now. There were two plastic wheels placed perpendicularly, which transmitted the movements in the two axes. The device, patented in 1970, is an “X-Y position indicator”. For friends (and for the long cable that protrudes like a tail), “mouse”. The nickname was so popular that the Spanish called it “ratón”, and even the French, the usual nationalists of computer language, preferred to keep the name “Souris”, mouse.
In 1984 with the birth of the revolutionary Apple Macintosh computer, the mouse became indispensable to make the interaction between man and machine more intuitive. Engelbart and a few other researchers including Joseph Licklider and Bob Taylor were the hidden protagonists of the revolutionary idea that the computer could be a tool for communicating with which it was easy to enter into a relationship by interacting with it. Engelbart was responsible for the concept of Intelligence Augmentation.
The idea that the machine should not replace man and perform activities in his place, but support human intelligent activities by supporting them and amplifying their performance. The vision that the computer was neither the cold and distant executor of calculations, nor the substitute for human intelligence (as in the case of artificial intelligence), but the support for all intellectual activities of human beings, capable of facilitating their work and increasing their capacities without the ambition to replace them.
From the late 1950s, he worked at the Sri (Stanford Research Institute) where he founded and directed the Augmentation Research Center. Engelbart adhered to a powerful philosophy of technology: the idea that devices and human beings could coexist through an intense process of communication. The mouse is only the most famous of his inventions: he is the creator of the very idea of the graphic interface, the use of icons and windows to interact and give orders to the computer, teamwork and communication between human beings through machines.
And above all, it is to him that we owe the vision of interface friendliness. According to some critical scholars, the intuition that the electronic device had the characteristics of a terminal with which to entertain a communication accessible even to laymen without high technical skills, decreed the success of computers.
The system included all the graphic innovations he had worked on up until then, it was the interface model that became so familiar to us. His projects were financed, among other things, by that office of the Arpa (Advancedresearchprojectagency) which later also implemented the Internet's forerunner network, Arpanet. It was not by chance that Sri was one of the two nodes connected for the first time on 21 November 1969 by a communication protocol, the first embryonic version of a communication network between computers, the first two nodes of Arpanet, that planetary network that seems to have now definitively enveloped us.
The connection between graphic interfaces and the network shows that there was a considerable connection between the two areas of research. The idea that they had in common is the ease of communication with and through technology, although the network took longer to find the killer application than the graphical user interfaces. Engelbart's role seems to have ended in 1976, but only formally, because most of his collaborators passed through Xerox's famous Parc (Palo alto research laboratory), to whom we owe the greatest innovations in personal computers, from whose nursery of researchers and projects both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs drew when they created the successful graphical user interfaces that we are all used to using.
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