Ahmad Oryakhil
Professor Kenneth C. Thompson
ENGH – 302 –SN2
June 12, 2015
Douglas Engelbart
In the beginning Computers were not personal in anyway, they were enormous and hugely expensive machines. It needed team of engineers and specialists to keep it running. In fact one of the first computers called ENIAC was built in the University of Pennsylvania to do ballistic calculation for the US military. ENIAC took almost 2000 square space and weighed 30 tons. However, many creative thinkers proved that computer could be personal and interactive. One of the people who paved the way for humans to interact with computer was Douglas Engelbart who invented the Mouse.
Douglas EngelBart was an engineer, who served his life in finding ways that computers could augment human intelligence. His goal was how to create a technology that could expand human intelligence and human interaction with computer, so they could use to manipulate, store and share information. He invented the concept of augmented Intelligence and in to order to fully understand it, he went to Berkeley to study computer science and earned his doctorate in 1955. Later in October 1966, he published a paper titled “Augmentating Human Intellect”, where he explained how human mind and computer capabilities would work together (275).
Engelbart has many remarkable contributions to the computer revolution, but the most notable and important one is the invention of the mouse. He invented the Mouse in 1961 that changed the way we interact with each other and with the computer. His idea did not come from trying to find any problem, however he was trying to find the simplest way for users to interact with computer. He used multiple options like light pens, joysticks, trackballs, and tablets with styli and users that control it with their knees but he invented the concept of the mouse from a device that he used in high school called perimeter (276). Perimeter was used to calculate the area of a space by rolling it around and he used that concept to replicate the concept of the mouse (277). Walter Isaacson describes that Engelbart shows the functionality of the mouse in his sketch that “the device could roll around a desk top and its two would register lower and higher voltages as they turned in each direction.” As a result of that voltage the cursor on the computer screen would move up and down. It was due to Engelbart genius inventions that the computer revolution began. And Innovations like “Graphical user Interface” start allowing users to select icons on the computer screen instead of writing complicated commands.
In conclusion, Engelbart was one of the first people who realized the accelerating power of the computer and the impact it would have in the society. His invention of mouse “ made use of the human talent of mind- hand – eye coordination (something robots are not good at) to provide a natural interface” (277) and made personal computers even more convenient and user friendly. That is why one of the important questions is that what are some other devices or machines that could be combined with the intuitive talents of humans and how could we combine the intuitive talents of humans with other machines or devices?
Works Cited
Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created The Digital Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Print.
ENGH 302-SN2 Course Blog Summer 2015 