Doug Engelbart 1968

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers

working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research

Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration

of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public

presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the

Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000

computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But

the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including

hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as

shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites

communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

“I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed

it.” –Doug Englebart, 1968

What a fascinating demo. The quote above is from Clip 12. http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html