The mouse hits 40

 

The computer peripheral celebrates its 40th birthday.

Invented in 1968 at the Stanford Research Institute in California, the mouse has gone on to become as important to the computer as the keyboard.

The first-ever mouse was a wooden block with wheels. This contraption led one of the researchers to name it a ‘mouse.’

“We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name. But it didn’t,” said the team leader of the project, Doug Engelbart.

The first prototype of the mouse was developed in 1964 when Engelbart and team were studying the correlation between humans and computers.

It made its debut at a presentation of a working network computer system in San Francisco in 1968. Before the mouse, people working on computers would use a light pen to navigate around the screen.

The first commercial release of the mouse was launched by Xerox in 1981, followed by Apple Macintosh computers who launched it to international recognition.

Touch screen interfaces and gesture control, such as that offered by Nintendo Wii and Apple’s iPhone, are the mouse’s biggest competition as a computer input method today.

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