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FinNode Joins 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Computer Mouse

FinNode today joined the 40th year anniversary celebration of Doug Engelbart's seminal demonstration of the first computer mouse. Engelbart was honored at a sold-out event, held at Stanford University and hosted by FinNode partner Media-X, which commemorated the December 9th, 1968 demonstration by Engelbart of a hand-sized box with two positioning wheels that could be used to move a 'bug' on a computer screen - at the time it was a breakthrough in what would become known as a graphical user interface for computers.

"FinNode congratulates Doug on his historic research breakthroughs and is proud to carry on the tradition of cutting-edge research by facilitating student and researcher exchange programs between Finland and Stanford & UC Berkeley," commented Jouko Salo, Program Manager at FinNode in Silicon Valley.

Engelbart also demonstrated on that historic day in 1968 several other paradigm-changing technologies including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and shared-screen collaboration between two computers over a network (i.e. videoconferencing and teleconferencing). All of these technologies have become fundamental to computers and computer networks as we know them today, leading Wikipedia historians to refer to Engelbart's presentation as the "mother of all demos." A digitized video of the original demonstration can be seen on YouTube and at the official 'MouseSite' at: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

The commemorative event, called "Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing," was held at the Stanford University Memorial Auditorium and drew an all-star crowd of Silicon Valley speakers and attendees. See http://www.sri.com/engelbart-event.html for more event details.