What do you think of this fact?
Your mouse is probably plastic, wireless and maybe even glowing in RGB. The very first computer mouse was a block of wood. Bill English built it in 1964 at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). The shell was crafted from redwood by the institute’s machine shop.
A showdown of pointing devices
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart ran a lab at SRI with a big goal: enhancing human intellect through technology. His vision of a partly graphical interface needed a way to point at things on a screen. The popular tool for that back then was the light pen.
So Engelbart’s team put the options to the test: the light pen, a joystick, a tracking ball and a few devices they rigged up themselves. One of the homemade ones was a hand-held wooden block with perpendicular wheels underneath and a single button on top. In 1965, the team published its final report. The verdict: the mouse won hands down.
Nobody knows who named it
Where the name came from is a mystery. Engelbart said no one could remember who started calling it a mouse, and that he was surprised the name stuck. His best guess: it just looked like a mouse with a tail.
On December 9, 1968, Engelbart showed the mouse to the public in a 90-minute demo at a computer conference in San Francisco, later nicknamed the “Mother of All Demos.” The mouse on stage had three buttons. At first, the cord pointed the other way, but it got tangled when you moved your arm. So the team turned the thing around, and the tail came out the top.
From patent to museum
The patent was filed in 1967 and granted in 1970 as US Patent 3,541,541. The word “mouse” is nowhere in its title: “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” Today the original prototype belongs to the Computer History Museum, donated by SRI. Before that, its exhibit had shown a replica, made by Bill English himself.
In 2011, a mouse cast from 18 carat white gold and set with 59 diamonds won the Guinness World Record for the most expensive computer mouse.
Every click you make today goes back to a carved-out block of wood with wheels.