History of the Computer Mouse

The history of the computer mouse begins with Douglas Engelbart who, amongst other things invented the first computer mouse in 1963 which was a wooden shell with two metal wheels.

On the patent application, Engelbart wrote "it is a X-Y position indicator for a display system."

history of the computer

The name 'mouse' was coined by Engelbarts friend Bill English who was a computer engineer working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center. While English was working at Xerox PARC, he further developed the mouse by replacing the orginal set of wheels with a ball. This was invented in 1972 and it came as part of the hardware package of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.

The invention of the mouse was just a tiny piece of Engelbart's much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect. And unfortunately didn't receive any royalties for it as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers. The use of the mouse didn't become popular till the 80's when Apple began using them for the Apple Macintosh.