On that day in 1968 Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and a group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals.

This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

The original 90-minute video of this event is part of the Engelbart Collection in Special Collections of Stanford University. This original video has been edited into 35 segments and reformatted as RealVideo streaming video clips.

What we saw in the late 60s has progressed to become a commonly used ball mouse. This was the defacto standard for navigating computer operating systems, at least until the late 90s with the emergence of optical sensors, when accuracy and tracking was taken to the next level. Laser sensor technology made their consumer debut in 2004.

Razer introduced the first high performing mouse in 1999. It clocked at 2000 dots-per-inch and established a new category of mice, Gaming Mice, and a new benchmark for mouse performance, DPI. Razer has always believed in hardware solutions and that performance features such as resolution and speed must be built into the firmware and not interpolated through software or through the magnifying of lenses.

Today we all owe a lot of our enjoyment and gaming pleasure to Dr. Engelbart, who incidentally is the proud owner of one of the original Boomslang and most recently Copperhead mice.