On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 9:08 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

From: Larry McVoy

And the mouse unless my boomer memory fails me.

I think it might have; I'm pretty sure the first mice were done by

Engelbart's group at ARC (but I'm too lazy to check). ISTR that they were

used in the MOAD.

They were and they were, but they were clunky, wooden things. He did
refer to it as a "mouse" in the MOAD, but he also referred to the
cursor as a "bug", which did not catch on.

PARC's contribution to mice was the first decent mouse. I saw an ARC mouse at

MIT (before we got our Altos), and it was both large, and not smooth to use;

it was a medium-sized box (still one hand, though) with two large wheels

(with axes 90 degrees apart), so moving it sideways, you had to drag the

up/down sheel sideways (and vice versa).

PARC'S design (the inventor is known; I've forgetten his name) with the large

ball bearing, rotation of which was detected by two sensore, was _much_

better, and remained the standard until the invention of the optical mouse

(which was superior because the ball mouse picked up dirt, and had to be

cleaned out regularly).

Invented by Ronald Rider, developed by Bill English?

PARC's other big contribution was the whole network-centric computing model,

with servers and workstations (the Alto). Hints of both of those existed

before, but PARC's unified implementation of both (and in a way that made

them cheap enough to deploy them widely) was a huge jump forward.

Although 'personal computers' had a long (if now poorly remembered) history

at that point (including the LINC, and ARC's station), the Alto showed what

could be done when you added a bit-mapped display to which the CPU had direct

access, and deployed a group of them in a network/server environment; having

so much computing power available, on an individual basis, that you could

'light your cigar with computes' radcally changed everything.

This is long, but very interesting: https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc

Markov's book, "What the Dormouse Said" (which I heard recommended by
Tom Lyon) goes into great detail about the interplay between
Engelbart's group at SRI and PARC. It's a very interesting read;
highly recommended. Engelbart comes off as a somewhat tragic figure.

- Dan C.