Mighty Mouse: The development of the computer mouse

Computers have been around since the end of World War II. In order to use most of them, you had to learn fancy computer languages or use stacks of cards with holes punched into them or reel after reel of coded magnetic tape.

All that changed when an obscure experimental gadget was turned into the ultimate computer accessory that just about anybody could use.

The patent for the computer mouse was granted on Nov. 17, 1970 — 55 years ago next Monday.

1964: Douglas Engelbart

While trackballs had been worked on since 1946, it was Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute at Stanford University who decided the answer to controlling a cursor on a computer screen wasn’t rolling a ball, it was moving a handheld device around on a desk. In his 1967 patent application, Englebart called it an “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” But most folks would call it a “mouse.”

Englebart believed in what came to be called a graphical user interface, or GUI. This would allow users to abandon line after line of memorized code and, instead, simply look for icons on their computer screens and click to open them. This was a radical idea at the time.

Englebart’s patent was granted on Nov. 17, 1970. While the mouse would be brilliantly suited for the GUI, the leaders in the computer world simply weren’t ready yet to turn their devices over to the general public. His ideas and his mouse wouldn’t see much use for another decade or so.

April 27, 1981: Xerox 8010 Star

It wasn’t until the 1980s that a computer manufacturer — in this case, Xerox — got serious about a computer workstation with a graphical interface that would be easy to learn and use.

Building on ideas developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC — located across the campus from the lab where Engelbart worked on his mouse — Xerox developed a system that used what it called “What You See Is What You Get,” or WYSIWYG, computing for users: a bitmapped display, windows, folders, icons, file and print servers and, of course, the mouse to navigate through all this.

These things are common today. Forty years ago, not so much. The Xerox Star 8010 was a radical new idea in computing. The downside: The price tag on the system was as eye-popping as its technology: A single workstation sold for $16,000. To outfit an office with Xerox Star machines, plus a network and printers, could cost $100,000.

Not surprisingly, Xerox would sell only 25,000 machines.While most of the computer world would invest in the IBM Personal Computer that would come out three months later, there was one industry leader who became infatuated with the work Xerox did at PARC, the graphical interface it developed and its super-cool mouse: 26-year-old Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs.

1984: Apple Macintosh

Apple was a hot commodity in those days and everyone wanted a piece of it. Jobs offered Xerox a 100,000 shares of Apple stock in return for licensing to Apple Xerox’s work on its graphical interface and its mouse.

While the first Macintosh computers offered in 1984 were by no means cheap — the original Mac 128K sold for $2,495 — enough companies had become interested in desktop publishing and information graphics that the machines, and their funny little mice, sold briskly. This was aided by smart advertising campaigns. Jobs and his people knew how to market their work.

Many of today’s computer users had never touched a mouse until they sat down in front of a Macintosh for the first time. Apple’s primary competitor, IBM, wouldn’t introduce mice until its IBM Personal System/2 line of computers in 1986.

Today

The mechanical mouse has given way to the optical mouse, which works by using an LED light that illuminates a tiny bit of the surface below — typically, a mousepad — and then uses that as reference for judging how far, how quickly and in what direction a user moves the mouse.

While there are all sorts of fancy mice available designed to conform to the hand of, say, a high-end gamer, your typical Further Review page editor uses a basic Logitech brand wireless mouse, powered by a single AA battery and available at any electronics or office store for under $20.