If you've seen the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley, you may be familiar with the popular story of the early days of Apple Computers and Microsoft.

Back in the 1970's, of course, computers didn't have a GUI (Graphical User Interface). If you worked on a computer, you were simply interacting with text on the screen. According to the movie, the researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), owned by Xerox, were working on several important innovations. Among these new technologies were the GUI and the mouse.

The movie goes on to depict how Xerox's Board of Directors failed to see the importance of some of these technologies ('Why would anyone need a mouse?'). Indeed, when the boys from Apple Computers came calling and proposed to work on a 'joint effort', the Board ordered their researchers to open the doors of the Research Center to Apple.

The movie portrays ulterior motives on the part of Apple, who quickly snatched up key innovations and integrated them into the early line of Apple computers.

But wait, there's more! Bill Gates and Microsoft meanwhile were allegedly wooing Apple, and used a similar argument to convince Apple to share its technologies (i.e. 'we will be more powerful if we work together'). Microsoft severed its relationship with Apple when it released its own GUI with mouse support for the MSDOS operating system, which they renamed Windows. Microsoft went on to own a substantial percentage of Apple Computer shares.

The plot, however, gets even thicker than the movie portrays. It turns out that the researchers at Xerox were not the first to invent the mouse. In actuality, the mouse is a product of the 1960's!

What's left out of the story is that the mouse and a multitude of other personal computing firsts spotted by the boys from Apple on that Xerox PARC tour were, in truth, first conceived of by Doug Engelbart in the early 1960's. At the time, Engelbart was a scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California. The ideas were brought to PARC by Engelbart researchers who started migrating over in the early '70s.

Engelbart has a forty-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of computing. At a time when computers were huge calculating machines known to a chosen few, Engelbart saw them as the engines that could 'augment' the human intellect and help people make the best of their abilities and pool their resources for maximum benefit.

His "oN Line System" (1962) already allowed the users to share documents, and contained a sort of teleconferencing system whereby two people working in different places could see each other on the screen next to the text they were working on; the texts themselves had hyperlinks and could appear in "tiled" windows to avoid overlapping. Back then, people communicated with computers using punched cards and real-time interactivity was still a thing of science fiction.

The links below are video highlights from a live public demonstration presented by Engelbert and his group of 17 researchers in 1968. About 1,000 computer professionals attended the demonstration. This was the public debut of many key innovations, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two people at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface, and the first computer mouse.

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21 February 2003  |   permalink