Happy Birthday Mouse!

On December 1 2008, the computer mouse turned 40. Mouse was first invented by a team of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute in California in the year 1968. The first-ever mouse, made by the team that was led by Doug Engelbart, was made from a wooden block with wheels mounted on its base. It has a red button on top of its case and a cable at its back. It is because of its resemblance to a mouse, it was nicknamed “mouse”. The mouse was the most dynamic input device of that time.

The mouse can be believed to an extension of the trackball that was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor while working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project in 1952. In the early 1960s, it was while studying the correlation between computers and humans, Engelbart had proposed the idea of making a mouse like device. The first working prototype of the device was developed by 1964, and a full-fledged working mouse was demonstrated in Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968.

Xerox launched the first commercial version of the mouse in the year 1981. The mouse gained recognition after Apple launched it with its Macintosh computer systems in 1984. Since then, the mouse has come a long way from having wheels that sense the movement to the mechanical mouse that had a ball to track the movement of the mouse. The latest developments in the mouse include the optical mouse that has photodiodes and LED’s that sense its movement. With the development in the wireless technology the mouse has even been liberated of the wire that attaches it to the computer.

Mouse has been an outstanding input device since the time of its development. However, the mouse is facing stiff competition from devices like touch pads, and touch screen devices. Go ahead and wish your mouse a happy birthday!