NLS (oNLine System) was an outgrowth of Engelbart's Augment group at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and also: not military.

I'm attaching an image from The Engelbart Hypothesis (2009) which shows the meditative full lotus/cross legged seating in use by some.

Bill English (also part of Engelbart's Augment group) not only invented the mouse, he basically pioneered the field of ergonomics. They partnered with Herman Miller to design a lot of their prototypes.

Trivia: (learned via John Daneen [sp?] at n CoLABoration 2010 Program for the Future held at the Computer History Museum with Engelbart et al present) SRI actually terminated Doug Engelbart after he gave the "Mother of all Demos" presentation in 1968.

Eventually, J.C.R. Licklider heard of the presentation & was so excited that someone had built a computer network (about which he had theorized, though "Lick" worked on SAGE [Semi-Automatic Ground Environment ]) that he contacted SRI to discuss providing them with funding (which is when NLS got subsumed into [D]ARPANet).

SRI, very quietly: hired Doug back.

There's unfortunately, a lot of confusion about a lot of this stuff as much of this technology was commercialized by companies which had no stake in creating it. e.g. Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) gets more or less all of it wrong, implying that Micro$oft and Apple stole such ideas from Xerox PARC.

PARC had a cross licensing agreement with SRI and SAIL.

Additionally, it is my understanding that Apple paid SRI licensing fees when they implemented their own version of the mouse (but they only used one button, whereas SRI/Bill English had already experimented with many variations and determined through user studies that three buttons had the fewest trade offs).

@alcinnz

#NLS #SRI #Engelbart #BillEnglish #Mouse #ChordedKeyset #ARC #HermanMiller #ergonomics #nonmilitarycomputing #ARPANet #Licklider #DouglasEngelbart #DougEngelbart #JCRLicklider #AugmentingHumanIntelligence #ComputerHistory