Technology History | SRI Menlo Park — The Patent Never Called It a Mouse, and SRI Owned It

The wooden block with one red button and a cord coming out of the back was carved here, and the people who made it named it after what the cord looked like.

Douglas Engelbart ran the Augmentation Research Center at what was then Stanford Research Institute, on this campus, and spent the early 1960s testing ways to move a cursor without a keyboard.

His team measured a light pen, a joystick, a tracking ball, a knee-operated rig and a head-mounted pointer against each other for speed and accuracy.

The wooden box won, and Bill English, SRI's chief engineer, built the first prototype from Engelbart's sketches in 1964.

Two wheels set at right angles under the shell, one reading each axis, converted the hand's motion into a position on a screen.

The patent, filed in 1967 and granted on 17 November 1970, never uses the word mouse. It is titled "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System," and SRI, not Engelbart, was the assignee.

That distinction decided who profited.

A United States patent then ran seventeen years from grant, so this one lapsed in 1987 — after the Xerox Star of 1981 and the Macintosh of 1984, but before the years in which a billion of them were sold.

Engelbart received no royalties. He said in interviews that SRI had licensed the device to Apple for something like $40,000 and that he learned the figure only later, which is his recollection rather than a documented contract.

One myth is worth killing here: the mouse was not invented at Xerox PARC.

PARC was founded in 1970, three years after the patent was filed, and the idea reached it in 1971 in the person of Bill English, who left SRI to work there.

SRI is a private research campus, so this is a street pin at the Ravenswood Avenue frontage rather than somewhere to walk into.

The photograph is SRI's own image of the prototype rather than a photograph of this address; no free photograph of the campus exists, which is a gap a visitor with a camera could close.

Photo: SRI International, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.