Douglas Engelbart in the context of "The Mother of All Demos"

A computer mouse (plural mice; also mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of the pointer (called a cursor) on a display, which allows a smooth control of the graphical user interface of a computer.

The first public demonstration of a mouse controlling a computer system was done by Douglas Engelbart in 1968 as part of the Mother of All Demos. Mice originally used two separate wheels to directly track movement across a surface: one in the x-dimension and one in the Y. Later, the standard design shifted to use a ball rolling on a surface to detect motion, in turn connected to internal rollers. Most modern mice use optical movement detection with no moving parts. Though originally all mice were connected to a computer by a cable, many modern mice are cordless, relying on short-range radio communication with the connected system.

"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration, named retroactively, of developments by Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968.

The 90-minute live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS, which demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, including windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also used to describe tables, images, and other presentational materials with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.

SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) was founded in the 1960s by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing.

The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better known by its abbreviation, NLS. ARC is also known for the invention of the "computer mouse" pointing device, and its role in the early formation of the Internet.

Engelbart's law is the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential. The law is named after Douglas Engelbart, whose work in augmenting human performance was explicitly based on the realization that although we use technology, the ability to improve on improvements (bootstrapping, "getting better at getting better") resides entirely within the human sphere.

Engelbart's Bootstrapping concept identifies the general, and particular, meaning of the observation with regards to rate and performance: a quantity, amount, or degree of something measured per unit of something else.That is, Engelbart's law is not limited to an increase in the acquisition, or use of, or quantity of knowledge, nor of the extent or depth of participation among individuals or teams, nor of the period-to-period change. The law is independent of the domain of performance and the quantity, amount, or degree on which one chooses a measure.

NLS (oN-Line System) was a revolutionary computer collaboration system developed in the 1960s. It was designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). It was the first computer system to employ the practical use of hypertext links, a computer mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts. It was funded by ARPA (the predecessor to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the US Air Force.

The NLS was demonstrated in "The Mother of All Demos".