The first computer mouse was a hollowed-out wooden block on wheels. Bill English, then chief engineer at Stanford Research Institute in California, built the prototype in 1964 to ideas Douglas Engelbart had been working on since the start of the decade. It had to win a contest first.
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Engelbart began making notes for the device in 1961. He wanted something better than the light pen, a pointer used on radar systems in the Second World War. His team tried the alternatives. Engelbart told the BBC the tracking ball was heavy, “like a cannonball”, and there was also a joystick and a light panel held up beside the screen.
The test it won
English’s “x-y positioning device” was a wooden shell with wheels underneath and a cord at the back. The cord kept getting in the way, so the team moved it to the front. In side-by-side trials the block beat every rival for speed and accuracy, even though nobody had used one before.
Nobody remembers who first called it a mouse. Engelbart said the team expected the name to give way to something “more dignified” once it left the lab. “But it didn’t,” he told the BBC.
From demo to desk
The world first saw it in San Francisco on 9 December 1968, when Engelbart demonstrated a working networked computer system. Dezeen notes that the event is widely called “the mother of all demos”, and that it also showed hypertext links, live text editing, multiple windows and shared-screen teleconferencing. The patent followed in 1970.
Xerox launched the first commercial mouse with its Star system in 1981, and it did not sell. Apple’s Macintosh took it to the mass market in 1984. The Guardian, citing the reference book Inventors and Inventions, reports that the institute licensed the mouse to Apple for $40,000.
Engelbart never earned royalties. His patent expired just before personal computers took off. By the time of his death in 2013, at 88, more than a billion mice had been sold, according to Dezeen.
What Engelbart wanted it for
To Engelbart the mouse was a small part of a larger aim. At the institute he led the Augmentation Research Center from 1959 to 1977, working on how computers could extend human thinking. He later founded the Bootstrap Institute, now the Doug Engelbart Institute, to carry on that work.
The sources differ on one honour. The Guardian dates his National Medal of Technology to 1998, while Dezeen gives 2000. Dezeen also records the Turing Award and the Lemelson-MIT Prize, both in 1997.
He did not count the mouse as the summit. Speaking to the BBC, he called it “sort of a disappointment” that he and the world had not got further.
