PC premiered 40 years ago to awed crowd:
The invention featured rudimentary windows and hyperlinks that allowed jumping from one document to another, as well as the ability to edit text and add graphics on a video monitor.
However, this puzzles me:
The mouse wasn't the automatic choice. It won out only after other approaches - a light pen, a joystick, even a knee-operated control - proved to be far less efficient, English said.
I would have guessed that the light pen would have proven more efficient than the mouse. Was this due to technological limits of the time? Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
Also, you can only use a light pen by poking at the screen with it. A mouse can be set up so you can move across the entire screen with a much smaller and less physically demanding wrist movement.
I used to have an A4 graphics tablet, and while it was good for drawing, it was a huge pain to use as a pointing device - I had to make huge swooping arcs with my forearm to move the pointer, and it soon became tiring.
Engelbart's idea of 'efficiency' was as much ahead of the time as the mouse was. He didn't just point and guess - he produced empirical models which measured accurately how easy it was to use each device.
The only thing which might be easier to use than a mouse is an eye tracker combined with a finger switch - there are commercial (military/med) products which work like this, but they're not as cheap as a $50 rodent.
I was hoping by now we could have something like a fine grain touch screen tablet A3 size: that would solve the feedback problem in that you'd be looking at what you drew. You can't be me, I'm taken
I had one of these for a while - one thing it isn't is light.
The other thing it isn't is accurate - the drawing accuracy drifted noticeably towards the edges.
There's a new generation of multitouch products due next year. A 22-24" multitouch interface light enough to keep on my lap is probably all I'd ever want for music, graphics and general browsing.
Like the display hardware it comes probably from the military (RADAR) displays. The light pen is only usable to select an illuminated point, i.e. for selection. This case is easy to program, as the light pen is activated the moment the display order is executed; the light pen interrupt pointed to it. – No need for big in-core data structures to search. With raster-graphic displays this advantage was no more and the light pen died.
Remarkable how long this trade-off worked. However, the needed storage was not readily available until the 1980s, delaying the use of raster graphic displays.
Even more remarkable it is that Engelbart was so well funded that he could ignore these short-sighted economies.
Those early years were very innovative, unfortunately the machines lacked the power, or the researchers and in particular the students (with the exception of the MIT AI Lab) lacked the machines. In that respect the PC was an educational machine.
