In 1962, computer scientists and hackers involved in
MIT's Project MAC, an early forerunner of the AI Lab,
took steps to alleviate this frustration. Time-sharing,
originally known as "time stealing," made it possible
for multiple programs to take advantage of a machine's
operational capabilities. Teletype interfaces also made
it possible to communicate with a machine not through a
series of punched holes but through actual text. A
programmer typed in commands and read the line-by-line
output generated by the machine.
During the late 1960s, interface design made additional
leaps. In a famous 1968 lecture, Doug Engelbart, a
scientist then working at the Stanford Research
Institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern graphical
interface. Rigging up a television set to the computer
and adding a pointer device which Engelbart dubbed a "
mouse," the scientist created a system even more
interactive than the time-sharing system developed a
MIT. Treating the video display like a high-speed
printer, Engelbart's system gave a user the ability to
move the cursor around the screen and see the cursor
position updated by the computer in real time.
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