Anything to do in San Mateo/San Jose

[lazlo]

Is this the same Xerox location that gave us the mouse and GUI?

Oh please, don't get him started!

Yes, it's the same Xerox PARC that invented the mouse and the GUI.

[macona]

We went to Halted and WeirdStuff last year. Halted is really proud of their stuff. High prices. Weird stuff had so much useless junk it was incredible. I mean shelves and shelves of old 10mbit routers... Geesh...

Michael, I have next tuesday free. My friend is flying over to Las Vegas for the day for a electronics distributors show so I have the day to myself. I cant seem to find your info.

Yep, Xerox PARC is the home of the Mouse/GUI which Apple licensed. Apple never claimed to invent it, they just made it usable for the rest of us.

[jkilroy]

You can try and track down my ex. She IS hot, but not worth the baggage!

[Evan]

I'm pretty much a PC guy, so I sometimes wonder about the Mac guys claiming their invention of the mouse and GUI. I think Xerox was first, though not on a personal computer. Any thoughts here? (Just trying to get better informed. No dog in this hunt.)

Hmm. Looks a lot like a PC to me. This is a shot of the Xerox Star, circa 1981 with a full WIMP GUI. (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer). Xerox was far ahead of everyone else. They also developed Ethernet at PARC as well as many other inventions.



BTW, that's an optical mouse. I still have a couple.

[ckelloug]

I hate to say this but SRI invented the mouse: Xerox only ended up getting the credit since they popularized it. A replica of the first mouse is on display at SRI Headquarters 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park CA.

--Cameron

[BobWarfield]

SRI did invent the mouse. Douglas Englebart to be precise. The Star was nevertheless, very cool, as was Smalltalk and various other Xerox innovations. The laser printer for example.

I've always thought there was a rich irony in Englebart inventing the mouse. In Computer Lib/Dream Machines or some similar vintage publication there is a story about Englebart. At the time he was working on what he called "intelligence amplifiers." He wanted computers to be tools that made us smarter. When asked what an "intelligence amplifier" was, he replied that he didn't know, but that he could tell you what the opposite was.

He said to imagine a great painter. Now take his paintbrush and strap it to a rock. Obviously it would reduce his talent.

What else is a drawing program and a mouse but strapping your paintbrush to a rock!

BTW, the Hiller Aviation Museum is right on 101 between San Jose and San Mateo and is a great little museum if you like aircraft.

Cheers,

BW

[lazlo]

I hate to say this but SRI invented the mouse:

Oh man, you're in for it now Cameron. After Evan gets up off the floor from his brain hemorrhage, you're in for lots and lots of Google quotes

[lazlo]

This is a shot of the Xerox Star, circa 1981 with a full WIMP GUI. (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer). Xerox was far ahead of everyone else.

This is a shot of Englebart's oN-Line System display, keyboard and mouse, circa 1968. He called it NLS, or oN-Line System, because it was also networked between multiple computers:



Here's a close-up of the three-button mouse on NLS. The box on the left is a 5-key "chording keyboard" which has been re-invented several times since 1968:



Here's a screenshot of the NLS GUI. It was based on vector graphics, and could display both text and lines on the same screen, but because of limited memory it originally only displayed upper-case characters. NLS had multiple windows, but no window bars. Englebart's demo, which was widely shown, included hypertext linking, full-screen document editing, context-sensitive help, networked document collaboration, e-mail, instant messenging, and even video conferencing (there were several video cameras panned on Englebart during the demo).



Englebart kept working on NLS until 1989 -- I'd love to see what the final version looked like!

ArsTechnica has a fantastic "History of the GUI", including NLS, the Alto (Xerox's first GUI, circa 1973), which was re-packaged as the Star document processor (circa 1981), the Apple Lisa GUI (circa 1983), ...

A History of the GUI

[Evan]

Stuff it Robert.

The Star was actually for sale.

[ckelloug]

In addition to developing the mouse, SRI received the first message on the arpanet (from UCLA) on October 29, 1969 as attested by lab notebooks preserved in the archives. As a recent slashdot article will attest, SRI also was the single largest recipient for the first SPAM e-mail: see http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html#msg

One of my favorite colleagues worked at SRI-NIC when SRI was domain registrar for the entire internet before SAIC/Network Solutions weaseled SRI out of the contract . He also was the last one to see the IMP, the multiple 19 inch rack Interface Message Processor, the predecessor to the modern network interface card.

While SRI never profited from the mouse, Doug Englebart's lab contributed some amazing things that Xerox and Apple were both happy to use and take credit for.

--Cameron

[Ausserdog]

If you're willing to drive a bit, the tours at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton are pretty good. Bit of a twisty road to get up there though!

[DR]

Drive over to Santa Cruz. Sit on the beach.

Got to Bob Rowe Machinery in SC. (if he's still there, last time for me was 2 years ago).

[aostling]

Go to Alice's Restaurant on Skyline Blvd & Hwy 84, above Woodside. Hundreds of motorcycles meet here for open-throttle runs on the twisties, or at least they did in the 1980s. Take a walk on Neil Young's ranch, and claim you got lost.

Walk the tracks to the iron railroad bridge crossing the bay at East Palo Alto, and marvel at the ancient drawbridge machinery still in use. The operator will be amazed to have a visitor.

Sit at a picnic table at Rosotti's Alpine Inn in Portola Valley and have a pitcher of beer while ogling the Stanford dollies.

[macona]

finally I am on the way down there. Got hung up on some last minute things.

From my iPhone

Jerry