William Kirk English: The forgotten name

SERIN THANKAM SAM

Search on the internet, who invented the computer mouse, the name that pops up is Douglas Engelbart. The other man who had made Englebart’s vision to reality is virtually unknown – William Kirk English aka Bill English.

This wizard who is behind the invention of mouse is an unsung hero. His name must have appeared once again when he died in July at the age of 91.

Mr. English’s story of the invention of mouse sounds very much like that of Apple’s Ronald Wayne. Although Ronald’s role in the tech giant’s past is glossed over, English’s role in the invention of the first ever mouse never went into oblivion.

Many of the features he and Englebart foresaw such as online text editing, video conferencing, and “hypertext”- the links now used to navigate web pages on the internet-found their way to the mainstream. These features that the duo once demonstrated still dominate today in modern technology.

However, Englebart was the more public face of the duo.

In the late 1950s, after leaving a career in the Navy, Mr English joined a Northern California research lab called the Stanford Research Institute or S.R.I .He met Douglas Engelbart , a fellow engineer who hoped to build a new kind computer.

While Englebart was considered the visionary, English was one of the only people who truly grasped the ideas and had the talent to bring them to fruition.

In simpler words, English built the mouse after Englebart drew a sketch of it on a notepad. A thingamajig made of a pinewood block,a crude button and a connector.

Mr Englebart had always struggled to explain his vision about inventing a mechanical device that could move a cursor across a screen and perform tasks by selecting particular symbols. It was English who could clearly understand the concept and had the engineering talent to put that concept into the first ever computer mouse.

They called it a mouse because of the way the computer’s on screen cursor, called a CAT, seemed to chase the device’s path.

When Englebart launched the mouse to the public in 1968 in what was dubbed as “the mother of all demos”, English was orchestrating things behind the scenes.

Mr English directed this elaborate production from the back of the auditorium, relying on cameras and microphones.

You can see the demonstration here: