The first computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964. Engelbart was a computer pioneer and inventor who founded Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center or ARC. Douglas Engelbart spent the decade with his team researching possibilities in human-computer interaction at ARC with funding from NASA and ARPA. Engelbart envisioned a world where computers were used by everyone to help organize our lives and augment our intellects. At this point in history, computers were big, expensive, and only used at large institutions. The world Engelbart saw was not yet even imagined by most, but he played a major role in changing that with his work at ARC. Engelbart never received any royalties from his invention as the patent was owned by his employer, the Stanford Research Institute. By the time the mouse was available on the consumer market twenty years later, the patent had already run out.
If history had been tweaked slightly, it’s possible that we would all be sitting in cubicles with weird headpieces attached to our faces (OK, weirder headpieces attached to our faces). One of Englebart’s prototypes suggested using a tracking device based on head movements instead of manual mouse clicking, but the mouse was ultimately more convenient to use. No kidding.
The mouse was first demonstrated at the “Mother of All Demos,” a retroactively named demonstration that changed the course of computer history forever. On December 7, 1968 Douglas Engelbart and his team from ARC demonstrated the first graphical user interface or GUI, the first computer mouse, the concept of hypertext, bitmapping, and video conferencing technology. The demonstration was groundbreaking and would create ripples through the computer world that are still felt today.