A great Alan Kay quote

[Scott David Daniels]

Francis Girard wrote:
> ...
> It's also interesting to see GUIs with windows, mouse (etc.), which apparently 
> find their origin in is mind, probably comes from the desire to introduce 
> computers to children.

OK, presuming "origin in is mind" was meant to say "origin in his mind,"
I'd like to stick up for Doug Engelbart (holds the patent on the mouse)
here.  I interviewed with his group at SRI in the ancient past, when
they were working on the "Augmentation Research" project -- machine
augmentation of human intelligence.  They, at the time, were working on
input pointing devices and hadn't yet settled.  The helmet that read
brain waves was doing astoundingly well (90% correct on up, down, left,
right, don't move), but nowhere near well enough to use for positioning
on edits.  This work produced the mouse, despite rumors of Xerox Parc or
Apple inventing the mouse.

Xerox Parc, did, as far as I understand, do the early development on
interactive graphic display using a mouse for positioning on a
graphics screen.  Engelbart's mouse navigated on a standard 80x24
character screen.

Augment did real research on what might work, with efforts to measure
ease of use and reliability.  They did not simply start with a good
(or great) guess and charge forward.  They produced the mouse, and the
earliest "linked" documents that I know of.

     http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org