The Mouse

The mouse is a pointing device that lets you control the position of a graphical pointer on the screen without using the keyboard. Using the mouse involves five techniques: pointing, clicking, double-clicking, dragging, and right-clicking.

Variants of the Mouse

A trackball is like a mouse turned upside-down. It provides the functionality of a mouse – but takes less space on the desktop.

A trackpad is a touch-sensitive pad that may be built into the keyboard or added to the PC as a separate unit. It provides the same functionality as a mouse. To use a trackpad, you glide your finger across its surface.

Many notebook computers provide a joystick-like pointing device built into the keyboard. You control the pointer by moving the joystick. On IBM systems, this device is called a TrackPoint. Generically, it is called an integrated pointing device.

Brief History of the Mouse

The mouse's history actually goes back to the early 1960s and a group of scientists and engineers at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California. One of those scientists – Doug Engelbart – part of a team charged with developing ways to "augment human intellect." Specifically, Engelbart's group was looking for ways to use computer systems to help people solve complex problems.

In his vision of this problem-solving system, Engelbart saw the need for a device that would enable the computer user to input data more efficiently than could be done using other standard input devices of the time, such as keyboards, light pens, and joysticks. With funding from NASA, Engelbart's team developed a series of simple tests to determine which input device enabled users to move a cursor around the screen in the least amount of time and with the least effort. In those tests, all the other devices were outdone by a simple wooden gadget – the mouse – that Engelbart had created with fellow scientist Bill English.

The first mouse was a small wooden box. Rather than the hard rubber ball used in modern mice, Engelbart's mouse actually used two small wheels, placed perpendicular to one another on the mouse's underside. The user could move the mouse only up and down or side to side (moving diagonally was a problem), but the device worked well nonetheless and served as a prototype for the mouse we know today.

The mouse was not noticed immediately by industry titans. In fact, few people, including leaders at SRI and Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), saw the mouse's value. Many did not see much of a future for computers in general, except for use by the military and some large businesses.

This lack of vision, however, did not stop (or even slow) the visionary Engelbart. Throughout his career, he has described or developed technology that was considered to be ahead of its time. His discoveries and inventions in the fields of networking, hypertext, user interface technologies, and other computing disciplines continue to affect everyday computer users. Although the mouse did not make him rich, it helped launch one of the most brilliant and innovative careers in the history of computing science.