It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bel…
Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn’t unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.
I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).
It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.
Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn’t unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.
Google had this vibe too, prior to going public.
Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)
I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).
It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.