The mythical mouse designed by Douglas Engelbart sold for a huge sum in a recent auction!
The mouse had been used by the great computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart at one of the most important conferences in the history of computing. It also inspired Steve Jobs in the design of the first consumer mouse in history. We are therefore not surprised at the price at which she left!
The Mother of All Demos
If you had to go back in the history of computing to try to find a founding event, many would point to what is known as “The Mother of All Demos”. This lecture, often considered the first keynote in history, was given by engineer Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968, and introduced many basics of the computer system to the public for the first time. The hypertext system, electronic mail, videoconferencing, graphical interfaces or the mouse thus appeared in the world that day.
And it is precisely a mouse very similar to the one used during this mythical moment 54 years ago that was recently auctioned by RR Auction. An object full of history, even if it is not the first version of our modern mouse: the one designed a few years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English was a wooden device incorporating two metal wheels. And to pay for history, you have to pay the price, as this auction shows!
$178,936
Many buyers must have wanted to afford this relic of computing, since it was finally sold at the exceptional price of 178,936 dollars! The mouse sold had a rope connector, three buttons and two wheels placed at right angles to represent the X and Y axes. It was accompanied in this operation by a coding keyboard, also made by Douglas Engelbart.
For the record, it was also this mouse that inspired Steve Jobs, who spotted it in the Xerox PARC at the end of the 1970s. After acquiring the license for 40,000 dollars, he had at the time requested its teams to turn it into a product that can be marketed. What gave a few years later the first mouse of the Macintosh.
Sources: Interesting Engineering, RR Auction on Twitter
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