THE “FATHER” OF THE MOUSE

To find the origins of the mouse, we have to go back to the almost prehistoric (in computer terms) year of 1963, when Doug Engelbart published a paper on how to augment human intellect through the use of the computer. This paper was almost 20 years ahead of its time in its description of such unknown concepts as personal workstations, networks of users communicating with one another, and word processing. Based on this paper, Engelbart received a grant to try out some of his ideas for using computers.

Among the many ideas that Engelbart's group explored to help people use the computer was the mouse. It was a pointing device that people found they could use easily without special training or other special equipment. The name came from the small size and the tail-like cord leading to the computer. The original mouse was made of wood and had a single button for sending commands to the computer, but soon the number of command buttons was increased to three.

The first computer to use the mouse was the Xerox Star, which was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and released in 1981. An alumnus of PARC then worked for Apple to develop the Lisa computer, which was the direct predecessor of the very popular Macintosh. Today, the mouse has become widely used with IBM compatible PCs as an input device for many different types of software.

Source: Steven Levy, "Of Mice and Men," Popular Computing

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