Happy Birthday : The Computer Mouse is 40

Invented by a team of researchers led by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in California in 1968, computer’s most dynamic input device, the “mouse”, has entered into its 40s on Monday.  

The first-ever mouse was made from a wooden block with wheels mounted on its base, and featured a red button on top of its case, and a cable at its back, which probably made one of the researchers to nickname it as “mouse”. 

Recollecting his memories on its name, Engelbart said, “We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name. But it didn’t.” 

Though Engelbart proposed the idea in early 1960s, while studying the correlation between computers and humans, the first prototype of the device was developed in 1964, and a full-fledged working mouse was demonstrated in Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968. 

The first commercial version of the mouse was launched by Xerox in 1981, but the device gained recognition after Apple launched it with its Macintosh computer systems in 1984. 

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Since then the device has been a prominent input device for computers, but today, it is facing stringent competition from touch screen interfaces and gesture control, as offered by devices like Apple’s iPhone and Nintendo Wii.