The first mouse actually predates the establishment of PARC, having been developed by Englebart in 1963 (at Augmentation Research Center) and made public in the famous 1968 ACM demonstration. By 1972, when the SMalltalk Project began using them, the mouse as an idea was already pretty well known, but it was considered mostly as a tool for computer graphics work. So PARC does get the credit for developing them into their modern form.
His work on windowing predates the PARC-style GUI, too; actually, several researchers were experimenting with them in 1968, including, IIRC, Papert at the MIT Learning Lab, and Nelson in the Brown University Hypertext Project. None of them never made them as much of a central concept as the Smalltalkers later did, though. |
