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The mouse that roared, and launched a PC revolution

On December 9, 1968, SRI's Douglas Engelbart ushered in the personal-computing revolution with his now-famous demonstration of the world's first mouse.

Daniel Terdiman Former Senior Writer / News
Daniel Terdiman is a senior writer at CNET News covering Twitter, Net culture, and everything in between.
Daniel Terdiman
A look at the world's first mouse, which Douglas Engelbart and William English invented and which Engelbart introduced to the world 45 years ago today. Click on the image above to see a slideshow about the demonstration. Stanford Research Institute

Forty-five years ago today, a group of techies sat in a room in San Francisco, eagerly awaiting what would become known to some as "the mother of all demos."

The occasion was the demonstration by Douglas Engelbart, director of Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, of, among other things, the world's first computer mouse. Many have since credited that December 9, 1968, presentation with helping to launch the personal-computing revolution.

The demo was actually of a number of projects that Engelbart and his colleagues at SRI were working on. But it's the mouse that won the day, and has resonated in Silicon Valley ever since. Yet, he also showed off game-changing innovations like the first hyperlinks, and the first navigable windows. (To see a slideshow about the demonstration, click on the image above.) Forty-five years later, it's easy to see why the demo's reputation was well-earned.