RIP Douglas Englebart

My first personal computer had no method to connect a mouse. and it was not until some time later that off the shelf graphical UI's became available. But there can be little doubt that the experience of computing, and perhaps most especially the use of computer to make music by musicians owes an enormous debt to Douglas Englebart. Ironically the invention was so far ahead of its time, that the patent had expired by the time most of us had any use for the mouse, and he saw no riches from what has become one of the most ubiquitous of computer peripherals.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/douglas-engelbart-inventor-computer-mouse-dies-age-88/story?id=19573100#.UdYbaaPn-7Q

What I used to think was interesting (and I STILL have one in storage) is that there's a one-handed keyboard meant to be used with the mouse.  You're able to do just about everything you could with a normal keyboard by creating chords (one button for each finger while the thumb had three choices allowing you to do lower case with the thumb on grey, capitals with the thumb on red and numbers/special characters with the thumb on blue).  Once you learn it (and I sort-of did at one point) you end up typing at about 45 wpm regardless of whether you were faster or slower than that on a real keyboard.  The idea was that one hand stayed on the keyboard while the other stayed on the mouse.  None of this typing and moving backing and forth to use the mouse.  It was really an efficient solution, but it never caught on.  Here's what the BAT Keyboard looked like (mine's almost new, I wonder if I could sell it for nostaglic value?).