The Mouse turns 40!!

My father in law knows this guy and got me his autograph for my office!



It rose from humble beginnings to become an essential piece of computer hardware.

But as the computer mouse turns 40, there are signs that it could finally be heading for the big electronic scrapheap in the sky.

When Doug Engelbart's team at the Stanford Research Institute designed a computer controller encased in a carved-out wooden block, with wheels mounted on the underbelly, one researcher nicknamed it a 'mouse'.

The very first computer mouse, which was invented 40 years ago
But the name was never meant to stick.


'We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name,' Engelbart recalled later. 'But it didn't.'

Its birthday will be celebrated next week when Engelbart, now 83, returns to Stanford.

The invention was first shown to the world when he gave a presentation of a working network computer system in San Francisco on December 9, 1968, which is still revered as 'the dawn of interactive computing'.

According to The Observer newspaper, Engelbart first started making notes for the mouse in 1961, after deciding that he could do better than the standard gadget, a light pen which had been used on radar systems during the Second World War. 'We had a big heavy tracking ball - it was like a cannonball,' he said.

'We had several gadgets that ended up with pivots you could move around. We had a light panel you had to hold up right next to the screen so the computer could see it. And a joystick that you wiggle around to try to steer things.'

One of Engelbart's collaborators, Bill English, built an 'x-y positioning device' made from a wooden shell with wheels and a connecting cord, or 'tail', at the back. The cord got in the way when it was used, however, and so it was moved to the front.

'We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before,' Engelbart recalls on his website.