On 9 December 1968, in a concrete hall under San Francisco, a nervous man in a white shirt drove a computer forty-eight kilometres away with a block of wood on wheels. Doug Engelbart showed the mouse, hypertext, shared editing and a video call in ninety minutes, with Bill English cutting cameras at the back. The audience stood and cheered. Then the funding went, his engineers left for Xerox, and the industry kept the pointing device and dropped the purpose he had built it for.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Bob Taylor, Jeff Rulifson, Alan Kay
- The idea it builds
- The mouse as two wheels at right angles reporting x and y, and a document stored as an outline of linked, collapsible nodes.