The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse

On December 9th, 1968, a Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controlled by a small wooden block with a wire trailing out the back.

The audience gave him a standing ovation. One witness said he was "dealing lightning with both hands."

But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this episode, we follow the surprisingly tangled history of the world's most common computer peripheral and its origins as a Cold War secret. We'll also find out why your cursor is tilted at a 45 degree angle.

In this episode

• The Mother of All Demos - the 1968 presentation that changed computing, and the device at the center of it
• DATAR - a classified Cold War radar project, and an unlikely contribution to computing history
• The Rollkugel - a German parallel invention and a patent rejection
• Xerox PARC and Apple - how the mouse finally reached the world

Episode Music:

• "Brocken Spectre" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Shape of a Gun" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Hedgehog's Dilemma" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Eternal Light" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0

Transcript

0:22

The lights go down in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. It is December 9, 1968. and a thousand computer professionals are waiting in the dark. On the stage sits a man named Douglas Engelbart. He is wearing a headset that makes him look like a pilot. And behind a camera, filming him, is Stuart Brand, the counterculture icon who edits the whole Earth catalog magazine. The two men know each other well. They had actually experimented with LSD together at a research lab. What they are about attempt is practically impossible. For the next 90 minutes, Engelbart doesn't just give a presentation. He shows the world the future. Above his head is a massive 22-foot high screen. His engineers have built custom modems and set up microwave links to beam live video and audio back and forth to their host computer 30 miles away in Menlo Park. any piece of this delicate duct taped network fails, the whole illusion shatters. But it doesn't fail. He edits text on a screen. He clicks on links. He video chats with his team. One person in the auditorium later describes Engelbart as dealing lightning with both hands. And to deal that lightning, his right hand never leaves a little wooden block sitting on his desk. It's a block of pine with a single red button on top and a wire trailing out the back. His team calls it a mouse. When the presentation ends, the audience gives him a standing ovation. They have just witnessed the birth of modern computing. But history is rarely a straight line. Because that little wooden block that changed the world that day was actually the end of a very strange, very secret quest I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Lore in the Machine. 16 years earlier, in 1952, the Royal Canadian Navy had a problem. It was the Cold War and they were building a computerized radar system called DADAR. It would be used to track phantom aircraft and ships. The magic of DADAR was that it allowed a whole task force of ships to calculate and share radar data with each other instantly. But this had a human problem. How do you tell the computer where the blip is on the glass screen? You couldn't type coordinates fast enough. You needed to just point. So a team of engineers looked around for something that felt right in the human hand, something heavy, something that rolled. They found it, a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. They built a cradle for it and surrounded it with discs to track its movement. You spun the bowling ball with your palm and the cursor moved. It was elegant, but because it was a military project, it was highly classified. It couldn't be patented. So the computerized bowling ball vanished into the filing cabinets of the Cold War. The Canadians had this ball, but they didn't have the box. By the mid-1960s, Douglas Engelbart was trying to solve the same problem as the Canadians out in California. But Engelbart wasn't building weapons. He was a philosopher as much as he was an engineer. He believed that if we didn't harness our collective intellect, if we didn't find a way for people to use computers to solve complex global problems together, humanity was doomed. To get to that grand collaborative future, he first had to find the path of least resistance between the human mind and the machine. So he sketched out a concept in his notebook that he called a bug. His team tested everything. They tried a light pen, but it made your arm tired. Engelbart even designed a device that sat under the desk, a lever that you clamped between your legs and pushed with your knee, leaving your hands free to type. But learning to use your shin to steer a computer lacked a certain grace. So they went back to the hand. Engelbart's lead engineer, a man named Bill English, took the philosophy and turned it into physics. He went to the shop. and carved a shell out of wood. He put two metal wheels on the bottom, one for up and down, one for left and right. And someone in the lab looked at this block of pine being pushed across the table with its long wire tail. They looked at the screen where the cursor, which by this time the team had nicknamed the cat for some reason, and they saw it darting away They saw the cat chasing the mouse. And the joke stuck. But here is the trick of parallel invention. While Bill English was carving wood in California, the physics solution was actually already sitting on a desk in Germany. Just weeks before Engelbart's famous San Francisco demo, a German company called Telefunken released a new device called the Rollkugel, or rolling ball. German engineers. had looked at the track balls being used in radar towers. These were the cousins of that secret Canadian bowling ball. And they had a simple, brilliant idea. They flipped it over. Instead of a ball you spin with your palm, they put the ball inside a device, resting on the table. It moved in any direction. It was mechanically superior to the clattering wheels of Engelbart's wooden block. But when Telefunken tried to patent the rolling ball, the German patent office rejected it. They said the device lacked inventiveness. It takes time for the future to be understood. It took Bill English moving to a new job at Xerox PARC, remembering the physics of rolling, and finally combining the German ball with the California box. It took designers Xerox looking at Engelbart's original on-screen cursor, which pointed straight up and realizing that it looked terrible on their low-resolution screens. So a designer named Alan Kay tilted the arrow 45 degrees. This made the left edge perfectly vertical, and it would draw much more cleanly on the digital glass. It has stayed tilted ever since. And even then, the world wasn't quite ready. In the early 1980s, a man named Jack Hawley was manufacturing the first commercial mice out of his shop in Berkeley. One day, a buyer for a large organization called him. The buyer was confused. He wanted to know about the food pellets. He thought Hawley was selling actual biological lab mice. As for Douglas Engelbart, the man who dealt lightning on stage in 1968, he never received a dime in royalties for his invention. His employer patented the mouse, but they didn't really understand what they had. Years later, they quietly licensed it to a startup called Apple Computer for about $40,000. Engelbart didn't mind. He wasn't trying to invent a desktop accessory. He was trying to figure out a way for human beings to navigate a complex world together. The little wooden block was just a tool to help us point the way. I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Lore in the Machine.