My first mouse

December 9, 2008, 10:26 am

Some say the ubiquitous computer mouse was born 40 years ago in 1968 when SRI researcher Douglas Englebart demonstrated, in what author Steven Levy called “the mother of all demos,” not just a kludgey wooden-cased mouse, but the system of user interactivity based upon it. However, I can say with authority that the mouse had escaped Englebart’s Augementation Research Center some months before.

Lawrence Livermore's PDP-1 installation

In September 1966 I began working at my first job after grad school. I hired into the engineering group supporting Lawrence Radiation Lab’s computer center with visions of working on the supercomputer (for the time) time-sharing system being assembled. My boss, Bob Wyman, however, gave me a wire-wrap tool and pointed me at the PDP-1 with the goal of designing and building an interface to a mouse George Michael was having built. George had seen Englebart’s work, and wanted a mouse to “play with.” My assignment was to design a two-channel A-D converter to digitize the x and y analog signals for the two potentiometers in the mouse. I don’t recall how long this took, but I think I made a good showing with my first project. For sure, the mouse was functional on the PDP-1 in early 1967.

Not long after I completed the mouse interface I transferred to a smaller engineering group supporting nuclear chemistry labs, so I’m not sure how much the mouse was ever used on the PDP-1, and getting all wrapped up in the laboratory automation that minicomputers ushered in, I paid no more attention to the user interface issues that Englebart was pioneering.

In 1984, the mouse became a permanent fixture in my personal computing environment when I bought an Apple Macintosh.

December 9th, 2008 | Tags: Blast-from-the-past | Category: Computing

4 comments to My first mouse

• David

  December 11, 2008 at 10:49 am

  Interesting history there, thanks for sharing… I’d love to see a picture of that mouse you built. 🙂

• Phil

  December 11, 2008 at 11:08 am

  David, I was necessarily vague about the mouse itself because I can’t remember the details. It was designed and fabricated by the mechanical engineers and was certainly more classy than Englebart’s wooden mouse, but I can’t remember it’s exact form, or where the button was placed. George mentions the mouse in this history of the PDP-1 article, but it doesn’t show the mouse.

• markj117

  December 11, 2008 at 3:27 pm

  Not sure if you saw this or not. I am watching the video now.

  The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event
  http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1142978073

• From a mouse to a light pen – Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

  November 12, 2009 at 11:12 am

  […] write a little more about working on the PDP-1 computer. While debugging the mouse interface I wrote about previously, I added a small enhancement to the light pen. The original light pen simply set a hardware flag […]