Computer mouse is 40 years old today
The chances are your hand is on one right now, if so look down and wish your mouse a Happy Birthday.
While the odd device above looks like it would be more at home in a tool shop, this is actually the world's first mouse which was unveiled to the world 40 years ago today.
It was made of wood and featured a single red button on the top with a wheel tracking movement, the cable which hang from the back gained it the name 'mouse' from researchers.
Designer, Douglas Engelbart came up with the idea in the early 1960s while exploring the interactions between humans and computers at California’s Stanford Research Institute.
In 1964 his team came up with the first prototype but it was four years later when the mouse was revealed to the world in a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
But it took a while for the rest of the world to catch up with the boffins and it was only in the 80s that the mouse took off.
The first commercial mouse was released in 1981 with the launch of the Xerox Star computer, but it was only in 1984 after Apple acquired the technology, it became popular with the launch of The Apple Macintosh.
Since then a mouse has been the default input method for computers but now it faces stiff with the development of gesture control and touch-screen interfaces as used in the Apple iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.
LINKS
blog comments powered by Disqus
