Visionary engineer Douglas Engelbart had a lot of ideas for computers. He presented some of his ideas to a crowd of a thousand engineers in December of 1968, back when computers were fed with punch cards and did little besides crunching numbers. He talked about networks of computer communicating with each other, word processing, cut and paste, saving files, and other new ideas that we take for granted today.
It wasn’t just the software that was revolutionary. Engelbart had also invented a new tracking device with the help of Bill English, an engineer on his team. As the small device rolled, a dot on the screen rolled along with it. “I don’t know why we call it a mouse,” Engelbart remarked. “Sometimes I apologize. It started that way and we never did change it.”
Engelbart called his program the oN-Line System, or NLS. His larger goal, beyond any of the…
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