MOUSE

Mouse 

   In computing, a mouse is a pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows for fine control of a graphical user interface.

   Physically, a mouse consists of an object held in one's hand, with one or more buttons. Mice often also feature other elements, such as touch surfaces and "wheels", which enable additional control and dimensional input.

History

   The trackball, a related pointing device, was invented in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin as part of a post-World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called Comprehensive Display System (CDS). Benjamin was then working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service. Benjamin's project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented a ball tracker[5] called roller ball[6] for this purpose.

   The device was patented in 1947,[6] but only a prototype using a metal ball rolling on two rubber-coated wheels was ever built[5] and the device was kept as a military secret.[5]

   Another early trackball was built by British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor in collaboration with Tom  Cranston and Fred Long staff. Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving) system in 1952.[7]

   DATAR was similar in concept to Benjamin's display. The trackball used four disks to pick up motion, two each for the X and Y directions. Several rollers provided mechanical support. When the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun and contacts on their outer rim made periodic contact with wires, producing pulses of output with each movement of the ball. By counting the pulses, the physical movement of the ball could be determined. A digital computer calculated the tracks, and sent the resulting data to other ships in a task force using pulse-code modulation radio signals. This trackball used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, as it was a secret military project as well

   Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) invented his first mouse prototype in the 1960s with the assistance of his lead engineer Bill English.[10] They christened the device the mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail and generally resembling the commonmouse.[11] Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his employer SRI held the patent, which ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.[12] The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect via the Augmentation Research Center.[13][14]

Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS) exploited different body movements – for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose – but ultimately the mouse won out because of its speed and convenience.[15] The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two wheels perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. At the time of the "Mother of All Demos", Englebart's group had been using their second generation, 3-button mouse for about a year. See the image of that mouse at Picture showing 2nd G mouse (A public domain version of this image would be nice.)

On 2 October 1968, just a few months before Engelbart released his demo on 9 December 1968, a mouse device namedRollkugel (German for "rolling ball") was released that had been developed and published by the German companyTelefunken. As the name suggests and unlike Engelbart's mouse, the Telefunken model already had a ball. It was based on an earlier trackball-like device (also named Rollkugel) that was embedded into radar flight control desks. This had been developed around 1965 by a team led by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken Konstanz for the German Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung as part of their TR 86 process computer system with its SIG 100-86[16] vector graphics terminal.

When the development for the Telefunken main frame TR 440 (de) began in 1965, Mallebrein and his team came up with the idea of "reversing" the existing Rollkugel into a moveable mouse-like device, so that customers did not have to be bothered with mounting holes for the earlier trackball device. Together with light pens and trackballs, it was offered as optional input device for their system since 1968. Some samples, installed at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Munich in 1972, are still well preserved.[17][18] Telefunken considered the invention too small to apply for a patent on their device.

The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use in 1973, and is regarded as the grandfather of computers that utilize the mouse.[19] Inspired by PARC's Alto, the Lilith, a computer which had been developed by a team around Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich between 1978 and 1980, provided a mouse as well. The third marketed version of an integrated mouse shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation came with the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1981. In 1982, Microsoft made the decision to make the MS-DOS program Microsoft Wordmouse-compatible and developed the first PC-compatible mouse. Microsoft's mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginningMicrosoft Hardware.[20] However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the 1984 appearance of the Macintosh 128K, which included an updated version of the original Lisa Mouse[21] and the Atari ST in 1985.