The Mouse on Your Desk

The mouse is today almost as ubiquitous as the smart phone. Although Douglas Engelbart is credited with its invention, the mouse has ancestors that predate the prototype that was presented in Engelbart's December 9th 1968 Mother of All Demos.

One cannot begin to discuss the origins of the mouse without talking about the trackball. The trackball was a pointing device that was invented in post-World War II-era Britain by Ralph Benjamin. It was invented to become a more useful replacement for the then joystick which was used to input coordinates for analog computers that would then calculate the future positions of target aircraft. All of this happened under the auspices of the British Royal Navy - one of dozens of examples of war being the driver of innovation in computing.

The trackball was useful enough that Kenyon Taylor, Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff of the Royal Canadian Navy, invented their own trackball. Unlike Ralph Benjamin's trackball, this iteration was never patented as it was a secret invention of the Royal Canadian Navy.

The trackball was without a doubt useful however, as with most computer technology developed in the 1940s, it was cumbersome and, the rise of the PC later in the 1980s would spur the need for a more compact pointing device. 

In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) wanted to augment human intellect using computer technology. To do this, he established a research laboratory within the SRI named Augmentation Research Center (ARC). Sometime in 1963, Engelbart conceived what would come to be referred to as the mouse and with the help of computer engineer William English, the first prototype of the mouse was built in 1964 and would later be presented to the world in the aforementioned Mother of All Demos in 1968. The English-Engelbart mouse used two wheels to ascertain position: one for horizontal position and one for vertical position.

A month or so earlier than the Mother of All Demos in October 2 1968, German radio and television apparatus company Telefunken came out with the Rollkugel (German for "rolling ball"), which was a pointing device. The difference between Engelbart's mouse and the Rollkugel was that unlike the mouse, the Rollkugel used a rolling ball to ascertain position instead of wheels and ultimately, this is the design that eventually took off.

The rise of the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s necessitated a more compact mouse. One of the first PCs to ship with a mouse was the Xerox 8010 and when Microsoft decided to add support for the mouse to their Microsoft Word program of the MS-DOS operating system, the mouse's status as a permanent fixture of the PC universe was almost cemented. Then in 1982, Logitech - a Swiss computer peripherals manufacturer - released the P4 mouse for Xerox and it became even more obvious that the mouse was here to stay. However, it wasn't until the release of the popular Macintosh 128K in 1984 that the mouse achieved the ubiquity and association with the PC it now has today and well, no PC will ever be complete without a mouse...