Interesting Fact # 946 - The Computer Mouse

The computer mouse was first demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart on 9th December 1968. It was made of wood and had one button.

You can watch a video of the demonstration here.

(The world's first trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor. It was as part of a project in 1952, and it used of all things, a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball, but it was not patented, as it was a secret military project.

Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in 1964 after extensive usability testing, but he never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.

The first known publication of the term "mouse" as a pointing device is in Bill English's 1965 publication "Computer-Aided Display Control".

The first marketed integrated mouse, which was shipped as a part of a computer, and intended for personal computer navigation, came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981.)

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