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The History of the Computer Mouse

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The History of the Computer Mouse
The computer mouse is considered an input device. With a click of a button, the mouse sends information to the computer. The computer mouse is an interesting device that offers an alternative way to interact with the computer beside a keyboard. A typical mouse has two buttons. At the top of the device you will find a left and right button which allows for “clicks”. There is a scrolling wheel between the two buttons.
Douglas Engelbart's device was not the first pointing device. In fact, it seems that the first product was a trackball. It was invented a lot earlier, in 1953, by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor for the Royal Canadian Navy. As part of the secret military project DATAR. The name “trackball” comes from the fact that the respective device actually used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. Just imagine how “easy” using such a product really was. (Vochin, 2009)
Engelbart created the first prototypes of the now-familiar device in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute, but he first displayed his creation to the public in Dec 6, 1968. ( Edwards, 2008) The mouse was much larger than today's mouse, square, and had a small button in the top right corner. It used two wheels to roll back and forth. It was the also the first mouse that could fit into a user's hand.
In 1972, Jack Hawley and Bill English, inspired by Engelbart’s work, designed a digital mouse for Xerox PARC. This new mouse didn’t require an analog-to-digital converter but instead sent digital positional information directly to the computer. It also contains the first mouse ball, which was a metal ball bearing pressed against two rollers to track movement. A similar tracking design would be used in most mice for the next 27 years. (History of the Computer Mouse, 2013)
In 1981, Xerox produced the first commercial mouse. It was built for the overly

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