Douglas Engelbart, known as the inventor of the computer mouse, passed away at age 88. He had a vision in the 1960s of using a graphical user interface and pointing device like a mouse to control and interact with computers. Engelbart invented the first mouse prototype in 1967 and received a patent for it in 1970. Though his work was initially unknown, the mouse was popularized by Apple and helped drive sales of the Macintosh in the 1980s. Today, over 240 million smartphones and tablets are purchased annually that all incorporate Engelbart's concept of intuitive point-and-click interaction using a touch interface.

1. “H.I.S.-tory”
by Vince Ciotti
© 2011 H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights reserved
Episode # 99:
Sad Obit of a
“Mighty Mouse:”
Doug
Englebart

2. We Interrupt Our HIS-tory…
• This week was to be Part 1 of the story of SiemensSiemens, the German
conglomerate that acquired pioneering shared vendor SMS...
• But in the news this morning (July 3rd,
2013) was the sad obituary
of one of the fathers of computing, Douglas Engelbart, a little-
known early electronics maven who dreamt big and delivered:
• The computer mouse, so
ubiquitous today, but a daring
input concept back in 1967.
• He also worked on the
ARPANET – the telecom “pre-
cursor” to today’s Internet.
• So let’s take a break from today’s HIS vendors and pay tribute to
this amazing man who literally “had a vision” and then worked his
whole life to deliver the goods. To keep things relevant, we’ll end
with how an input device featured in an early CPOE systems too,
since physicians were as keyboard-averse then as they are now!

3. Birth of the Mouse
• Doug started his e-career drafted as a U.S. Navy
electronic radar technician during World War II.
It might have been when he was sitting in front of a large radar
screen when he got the epiphany that guided his later efforts: a
user able to control the text and images that appeared on the
“CAT” (early term for a CRT) screen and communicate with others.
• He got his first “real” job working at the Stanford Research Institute
(SRI) in the late 1950s, where he worked on some of the first
graphic user interface (GUI) software and got the idea for the
computer mouse. In 1967 he applied for a patent for the mouse, a
thick wooden device with two wheels and three buttons.
• He got the idea in 1964 while attending a
computer graphics conference, where he was
musing about how to move the cursor on a
computer display. His patent was approved in
1970, and the rest, as they say, is HIS-tory…

4. Strange Name/HIS Connection!
• When he returned from the 1964 conference, Doug gave a copy
of a sketch to William English, an engineer at SRI, who, with the
aid of a draftsman, fashioned a pine case to hold the contents.
• And where did the term “mouse” come from?
A hardware designer, Roger Bates, contends
that the name came from the term then used
for the cursor on a green-screen: CAT. It
seemed the cursor was following their tailed
device….• SRI grew eventually to over 50 researchers, but was disbanded
when SRI was sold in 1977 to Tymshare, yes that shared HIS giant
led by Bob Pagnotta after they acquired his MDS from NJ!
• Sadly, Engelbart worked in relative obscurity until later being
awarded the National Medal of Technology and the Turing
Award.
• And the mouse? It too sat in relative obscurity until an early

5. Tale of Two Steves
• Jobs & Wozniak had made a splash with
their pioneering Apple 1 – ironically, this
early model went on sale last week for
6-figures! Back then, it retailed for a few
hundred bucks, little more than the
illegal “blue boxes” the Steves sold…
• The Apple II rocked back in the late 70s when the
micro revolution blossomed, and they Next (pun
intended) started on a business computer to make
some big bucks: thousands each, versus the few
hundred $s people spent on personal computers.
• This was the machine Jobs was working on
when he spied Englebart’s mouse prototype
at Xerox’ “PARC” (Palo Alto Research Center),
and he immediately realized its potential to
make this “Lisa” business PC an overnight hit!

6. Not Quite…
• Apple paid Xerox ≈$40K for the rights to the mouse, about the
price for four Lisa PCs! Why Xerox let it go for such a paltry sum is
unknown, but if you figure how much of a disaster the Lisa was,
maybe they were smart! At ≈$10K each, the Lisa was a dismal
flop despite its stunning GUI interface and mind-blowing mouse…
• Sales were so dismal Apple took them off the market and rumor
has it buried them in a pit somewhere in CA… I actually owned a
used Lisa for a few years in the 80s, but I only paid a few hundred
bucks for it. Sorry, no pictures – I never realized how rare it was!
• It was Apple’s next PC, the
Macintosh, that featured the mouse
that roared! Between the GUI OS and
the point-and-click mouse, Mac sales
took off, in part due to its more
affordable able price tag of about $1-
2K each, depending on options,

7. Of Mice and Men…
• The mouse put Apple’s OS on the proverbial map,
and the Mac was followed by the Mac Plus, then
the Mac SE (System Expanded), which was my first PC in 1987.
• We started HIS Pros that year, and I used my Mac SE extensively
for consulting reports and even brought it to a hospital client in
Long Island: St. Francis Hospital, a major heart center. I wanted to
show it off to their super-sharp MIS Director (no CIOs back then),
Dave D’Auria, who was using one of the early IBM AS/400s to
install IBAX (née Dynamic Control) HIS. So I schlepped the Mac
there, set it up on Dave’s desk and invited him to try out the
mouse, a far cry from the green-screen RPG he was used to…
• Dave just could not get the hang of it! Like most DP professionals
back then, the world was all Microsoft DOS, character-based,
driven by the keyboard, and Macs sold only to US households.

8. An Even Better HIS “Mouse!”
• Not sure what hospital poor Doug spent his last days in, but if it
happened to be El Camino Hospital, up near the Silicon Valley in
CA, even back in the 1970s Dr. Engelbart would have seen an
amazing sight that equaled or maybe surpassed his mouse.
• If you remember the previous
episodes on Allscripts that
traced the roots of Eclipsys back
to Lockheed’s MIS, this picture
should look familiar: the “light
pen” that provided the ultimate
point & click interface. Hundreds
of MIS Directors who tried
touching it got the message
immediately, as did their
thousands of physicians who
used MIS’ CPOE for decades.

9. Modern Mice
• I’m sure Doug was thrilled to see how
Microsoft’s Windows in the 90s finally
converted to rodent-hood, as every IBM
and clone PC came with a mouse & GUI.
• And he must have loved how Apple’s Steve Jobs took the point &
click device to a whole new level in the 2000s with their “touch
screen” devices starting with the iPod, expanded further with the
iPhone, and then causing another revolution with the iPad tablet.
• Ironically, page 18 of this month’s Consumer Report magazine
claims that according to the Consumer Electronics Association in
this year alone, the US is expected to purchase over 240 million
smart phones and tablets: that’s one touchy-feely e-gadget for
every man, woman and child over the age of 12! And every one will
feature the same intuitive point & click that Doug Engelbart saw in
his amazing vision back in 1964 – thanks Doug. And may you R.I.P.

10. Modern Mice
• I’m sure Doug was thrilled to see how
Microsoft’s Windows in the 90s finally
converted to rodent-hood, as every IBM
and clone PC came with a mouse & GUI.
• And he must have loved how Apple’s Steve Jobs took the point &
click device to a whole new level in the 2000s with their “touch
screen” devices starting with the iPod, expanded further with the
iPhone, and then causing another revolution with the iPad tablet.
• Ironically, page 18 of this month’s Consumer Report magazine
claims that according to the Consumer Electronics Association in
this year alone, the US is expected to purchase over 240 million
smart phones and tablets: that’s one touchy-feely e-gadget for
every man, woman and child over the age of 12! And every one will
feature the same intuitive point & click that Doug Engelbart saw in
his amazing vision back in 1964 – thanks Doug. And may you R.I.P.