Mouse turns 40 years

The well-known computer mouse will complete its 40 years of journey on this 9th of Dec-2008. The first known publication of the term "mouse" as a pointing device is in Bill English's 1965 publication "Computer-Aided Display Control".

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

Since the age of Windows operating system (and also Mac OS), the mouse has become part of computer. The technology era is further making developments with Touch Screen technologies, which may turn the mouse into a history!

Picture on top: The first computer mouse, held by inventor Douglas Engelbart, showing the wheels that make contact with the working surface.

Picture on bottom: Current computer mouse (my brand continues to be Logitech!)

Links:

- BBC News - Logitech says its factory in Suzhou, in western China, has produced the firm's billionth computer mouse.

- The First Mouse Demo.