It has been decades since the computers are in the lives of the people but have you ever wondered who might have created the little mouse of the computer. It was designed and developed by Douglas Engelbart with some assistance from Bill English during the 1960s. The first mouse was patented on November 17, 1970.
Design and mechanism of the mouse
An engineer and the inventor of the Stanford Research Institute – Douglas Engelbart, invented the prototype of a mouse in the 1960s. He worked along with Bill English, a lead engineer on the designing and mechanism of the mouse. The mechanism of the mouse originated in the post World War II era.
The computer device was named as a mouse because of its early model. It had a cord attached to its rear part; that looked like a tail of the rodent mouse. Thus, the device was named as a mouse. It was wooden, rectangular, quite larger than that of present mouses, and had only one button on its top-right corner.
The patent was with Stanford Research Institute, which ran out even before it was started to be used in personal computers. But Engelbart did not receive any royalty.
German mouse: rollkugel
Telefunken, a German company released a mouse-like device called Rollkugel on the 2nd of October, 1968. The word rollkugel means a rolling ball in the German language. It was released two months before Douglas released the demo of his mouse on the 9th of December. Engelbart’s mouse was based on an earlier trackball-like device, also named Rollkugel (developed in 1965)- present in the radar flight control desk.
More developments
The first-ever designed computer for personal use was developed in 1973. The Xerox Alto was regarded as the grandfather of the computers that use a mouse. It was inspired by PARC’s Alto, the Lilith computer that was developed by a team between 1978 and 1980, and it had a mouse as well.
The third version of an integrated mouse was shipped in 1981, as a part of the computer.
It was intended to be used by an individual. In 1982, Microsoft made an MS_DOS Microsoft word program that was compatible with mouse and also developed the first-ever PC-compatible mouse.
In 1983, Microsoft shipped its mouse along with its PC as hardware. However, the mouse remained complicated until 1984’s appearance of the Macintosh 128K. It included an updated version of the real Lisa Mouse.
Life of Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart was married to Karen O’Leary Engelbart and had four kids Christina, Greda, Norman, and Diana. He also had nine grandchildren. He died of acute kidney failure, after a very long battle with Alzheimer’s disease in his California home. He was a mild-mannered man who de-emphasized the importance of his inventions.
He developed the idea of the mouse quite early in the evolution of computers; thus, he and his colleagues never earned much profit.
