Several groups, one idea
A mouse is a small hand-held device that moves a pointer on a screen as it slides across a surface, with one or more buttons for selecting. Its history is a good example of how computing “firsts” tend to be shared. Researchers at several places worked on ways of pointing at screens in the 1950s and 1960s, and the device that became familiar to the public was shaped by many hands over about two decades. It is more accurate to follow the sequence of designs than to name one person.
Pointing before the mouse
Before the mouse, pointing at a computer screen was done in a number of ways. Light pens were held against a display. Joysticks and cursor keys moved a marker in steps. Trackballs, in which a ball is rolled by the hand, were used in the early 1950s for some military display systems. The common thread was a search for something faster and more natural than typing coordinates.
Research prototypes in the 1960s
The best-known early mouse came from Douglas Engelbart’s research group at the Stanford Research Institute in California in the 1960s. The group, which included engineer Bill English, tested several pointing devices on screen-selection tasks and found that a small wheeled device did well. The first versions were wooden shells with wheels set at right angles to each other, one for each direction of movement, and a button on top. A patent application for an “X-Y position indicator for a display system” was filed in the late 1960s and granted in 1970. The cable trailing from the back is generally credited as the reason for the name, since it looked like a tail.
The mouse reached a wide audience in a public demonstration of Engelbart’s system in 1968, which also showed on-screen text editing and linked documents. It was an influential event, but not an immediate commercial start. The mouse in 1968 was a laboratory device in a very specialized system.
Elsewhere, other groups were building related devices. A German company, Telefunken, produced a ball-based pointing device in the late 1960s for use with its computers. Different groups, in short, were exploring the same territory at around the same time.
Workstations in the 1970s
The next step was to put the mouse into machines that people used every day. Researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, many of whom had worked with or been influenced by Engelbart’s group, built experimental workstations in the early 1970s. They replaced the wheels with a ball that rolled against two internal rollers, which worked more smoothly on ordinary desk surfaces. These machines paired the mouse with bitmapped displays, windows and menus, and so it became part of a larger idea, the graphical user interface, rather than a stand-alone novelty.
Even then, the mouse was used mainly inside research laboratories and by a limited number of early users.
Commercial products in the 1980s
Commercial products arrived in the early 1980s. Xerox sold a workstation with a mouse in 1981. Apple’s Lisa followed in 1983, and the Macintosh in 1984 brought a one-button mouse to a much larger market. Other companies sold mice for the IBM PC and compatible computers, and by the later 1980s a mouse was a common accessory for those machines too. Software for the PC world gradually added support, and graphical programs and operating systems made it more useful.
Button counts varied. Apple used a single button for simplicity, while many others used two or three, so that different clicks could trigger different actions. Over time, two buttons and a scroll wheel became the usual pattern.
Ball, optical and beyond
Mechanical mice with a rubber-coated ball had a weakness: the ball and rollers collected dirt and had to be cleaned. Optical designs appeared during the 1980s, and for some years required a special pad with a grid. By the late 1990s, mice that used a small light and a sensor to track movement across ordinary surfaces had become widely available, removing the moving parts. Later designs used laser sensors, wireless links and rechargeable batteries. The scroll wheel, added in the 1990s, made it easier to move through long pages and became standard.
What the history tells us
The mouse took roughly two decades to move from laboratory prototype to a standard desk accessory. It needed several things to align: a screen on which pointing was useful, a computer that could track the movement cheaply, and software that took advantage of it. The prototype of the 1960s could not succeed commercially on its own, and the products of the 1980s relied on earlier research done in several places. That pattern, with shared credit and a long path from demonstration to product, is common in the history of computing and fits the way the story of the mouse should be told.