One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in any of these sources is that the grants that funded Engelbart during that one decade that he worked on the Mother of All Demos were approved by Bob Taylor (who later founded Xerox PARC and then the DEC Systems Research Center).

To anyone who hasn’t read it, I very much recommend the “oral history” interview Taylor did with Paul McJones at the Computer History Museum in 2008. The whole thing is fascinating and full of amazing stories.

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...

The relevant excerpt:

McJones: Did you work for two different companies between teaching and going to NASA or just one company?

Taylor: Two. I was at Martin for about a year, I guess, Martin Orlando. And one of my colleagues there had gone to work for a flight simulation firm in Riverdale, Maryland just outside of D.C. They were called ACF Electronics. They built a wider variety of flight simulators than any other company in the country. They made me an attractive job offer and we moved up there and I went to work for them. While I was there, McNamara, who was with Kennedy, who had just been elected president, was Secretary of Defense, standardized or attempted to standardize many of the aircraft across the Navy and the Air Force. Consequently, a company that based its reputation on building a wide variety of flight simulators was no longer quite so important because we were not going to have as wide a variety of airplanes. So ACF had been looking for other things to do and NASA was just opening up. I was encouraged to write a research proposal to NASA using flight simulators, but in a research context rather than in a teaching context. For example, one of the flight simulators that the company built was an anti-submarine warfare airplane flight simulator where you could simulate all of the stations in the airplane that were monitoring various sensor devices that were looking for submarines. There was a lot of display technology to fool around with and things that NASA was interested in. So I wrote this research proposal and sent it in. NASA called me and asked me to come down and talk to them. I thought they wanted to talk about the research proposal. And instead, they offered me a job in their newly-formed office of advanced research and technology. The job of this part of NASA was to fund the NASA research centers and also fund limited research in limited areas in private industry, and sometimes universities. Then they put me in charge of two research areas to manage the funding that went into these areas, whether it was the NASA center or in the private world. The areas were manned flight control systems and flight displays. While I was there I created another area called simulation technology. So I managed research in those three areas while I was at NASA. One of the unsolicited proposals that came in was from a guy named [Douglas C.] Engelbart at SRI.3	I thought it was an interesting proposal and he came into D.C. on his round of looking for money, and we talked. I funded his proposal and the mouse was created by NASA funding. Most people don’t know that. Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world? Well, there was a better example, but they didn’t know about it.

McJones: Was that the beginning of Doug Engelbart’s major funding?

Taylor: He had some smaller amount of funding I think from the Air Force, but the mouse work was actually done under a NASA project. And then when I went to ARPA, I funded it more, but Licklider had funded him as well, as a result partly of my funding.