The mouse: 1968 – 2008?

Bill Gates has suggested that the era of the computer mouse may be coming to a close. Certainly the tactile interface of Apple’s iPhone points the way to a more direct interaction with our data in the future.

 

We thought it might be time to provide, if not a eulogy then at least a little look at how the computer’s best friend got started.

The idea of a hand-held computer controller was first mooted by Douglas Englebart in  1963, he applied to patent the concept in 1967. US patent 3541541 was granted in 1970.

A possibly apocryphal story about the origin of the name suggests that when  Bill English built the first Englebart-designed mouse prototype it was originally called a "turtle". When a mouse ran across their workbench while Bill and Doug were working they changed their minds

In December 1968 Englebart demonstrated the mouse, and many other key IT concepts at the Joint Computer conference in a presentation that has since become known as The Mother of all Demos

 

Englebart never received any royalties for the mouse, to an extent because his patent expired in 1987, before the personal computer revolution put a mouse in every home, and partly because many subsequent mouse designs used slightly different technologies that did not infringe upon the original patent. During an interview, he said "Stanford Research Institute patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."