[COFF] Re: "Hot Spot" High Performing Centres in Computing

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Larry McVoy

    > And the mouse unless my boomer memory fails me.

I think it might have; I'm pretty sure the first mice were done by
Engelbart's group at ARC (but I'm too lazy to check). ISTR that they were
used in the MOAD.

PARC's contribution to mice was the first decent mouse. I saw an ARC mouse at
MIT (before we got our Altos), and it was both large, and not smooth to use;
it was a medium-sized box (still one hand, though) with two large wheels
(with axes 90 degrees apart), so moving it sideways, you had to drag the
up/down sheel sideways (and vice versa).

PARC'S design (the inventor is known; I've forgetten his name) with the large
ball bearing, rotation of which was detected by two sensore, was _much_
better, and remained the standard until the invention of the optical mouse
(which was superior because the ball mouse picked up dirt, and had to be
cleaned out regularly).


PARC's other big contribution was the whole network-centric computing model,
with servers and workstations (the Alto). Hints of both of those existed
before, but PARC's unified implementation of both (and in a way that made
them cheap enough to deploy them widely) was a huge jump forward.

Although 'personal computers' had a long (if now poorly remembered) history
at that point (including the LINC, and ARC's station), the Alto showed what
could be done when you added a bit-mapped display to which the CPU had direct
access, and deployed a group of them in a network/server environment; having
so much computing power available, on an individual basis, that you could
'light your cigar with computes' radcally changed everything.

	Noel