You know the computer mouse — that little plastic thing you've probably stepped on in your backpack — right? It was invented long before personal computers existed and not by Apple or Microsoft.
The guy behind it was Douglas Engelbart, a visionary who saw computers not as calculators, but as tools to augment human intelligence. That idea, now so baked into our digital lives, traces back to the 1960s and changed everything.
A Vision Beyond Machines
Engelbart wasn't just fiddling with gadgets — he was trying to answer a big question: How can we make humans smarter by partnering with machines? His 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect wasn't a tech roadmap — it was a philosophical manifesto.
The mouse was just a tiny piece of a much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect.
— Douglas Engelbart
That approach laid the philosophical groundwork for every interactive computer system that followed.
The Mother of All Demos
In 1968, Engelbart unveiled a 90-minute tech showcase now called "The Mother of All Demos." This wasn't a TED Talk — it was the first public unveiling of:
- The computer mouse
- Graphical windows
- Hypertext linking
- Real-time collaborative editing
- Video conferencing
- On-screen word processing
Imagine seeing all of that before the internet existed. Steve Jobs later admitted that this kind of hands-on interaction was the future of computing.
Engelbart's inventions like the mouse were initially crude — a one-button wooden block whipped up in 1964 — but they fundamentally changed how humans interact with computers.
Augmenting Human Intellect paper published
Wooden mouse prototype created
Mother of All Demos presented
Xerox PARC: The Innovation Engine
Engelbart's ideas spread like seeds. Engineers who once worked with him — and those inspired by his demos — helped build Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC became Silicon Valley's innovation engine in the 1970s, inventing:
- Graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
- Ethernet networking
- Laser printing
- The modern mouse refinements
Much of what makes computers usable today — icons, windows, drag-and-drop — came from PARC's labs.
Steve Jobs, Apple, and the GUI Revolution
In 1979, a young Steve Jobs paid Xerox a reported $1 million in Apple stock just for a peek at PARC's research. Within minutes he told his team:
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me — the graphical user interface — that I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life.
— Steve Jobs
That reaction sparked the Apple Lisa and later the Macintosh — the first personal computers with GUIs many ordinary people could use. By 1984, Mac sales helped Apple jump from startup to cultural force.
Bill Gates and the Windows Ecosystem
Meanwhile, Bill Gates and Microsoft were watching closely. Microsoft licensed some concepts and began developing Windows, a GUI environment that would eventually ship on millions of PCs worldwide. By the early 1990s, Windows dominated the market with over 90% desktop share, making graphical computing mainstream.
It's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox...
— Bill Gates, on the Mac vs. Windows story
The Legacy Today
Engelbart's legacy isn't just gadgets — it's interaction design itself. Computers today — from Google Docs to Zoom — still use collaboration and interface concepts he pioneered.
How do you harness the collective intelligence of the world to solve urgent global problems? That's what Doug was about.
— Adam Cheyer
Engelbart's early vision — that computers could expand human capabilities — wasn't a prediction. It was a blueprint. From the humble mouse to the GUI revolution to the era of AI assistants, practically every step in computing traces back to his insight that computers should think with us, not just for us.