Goodbye to William English, he invented the mouse

William English left us on 26 July due to respiratory problems, also known as Bill, a computer engineer without whom today we would probably not have an essential peripheral in interacting with computers: the mouse. The contribution made in the early 1960s when he was at work at the Augmentation Research Center of the Californian SRI International managed by the Stanford Research Institute was fundamental.

William English 1929-2020, co-inventor mouse

So he joined his former colleague Doug Engelbart, who died in 2013, by his side in 1963 for the creation of the prototype visible below, a pointing device for interacting with the interfaces on the screen. It was the idea of ​​Engelbart, the realization of English.



He also took part in the initiative known as The Mother of All Demos which in the distant 1968 anticipated some of the innovations and ambitions which in the following decades characterized progress in the technological world: from the concept of hypertext links to information storage, to tools for formatting texts.

If in your office, you as intellect workers, were provided of a display connected to a computer operating all day and able to respond instantly to your every action, how much value could you get from it?



Before moving his first steps in the world of it, English has served the US Navy in the United States and Japan. He left SRI in 1971 to join Xerox PARC, where he managed the Office Systems Research Group. There he designed a mouse can detect motion not only through a series of rollers, but with the use of a ball, in a manner similar to that proposed in 1968 by the German Telefunken with the device of the baptized Rollkugel. In 1989 he joined finally to Sun Microsystems to support the company's expansion to international level.

Source: The New York Times