On Mon, Oct 2, 2023 at 9:08 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)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.