The Mouse
Chantal Livesay Aug 14th, 2016 MA Interactive Design Professor David Meyers 5403 Media History and Theory Essay 03
The History of the Mouse When most people think about computers, the mouse is just a second thought. It’s just a device that we use to move the cursor around on the screen and so we can click on links and applications. But the mouse has been an influential step in the evolution of technology, like its partner the computer. Before the mouse became a common device there were many different versions. In 1941 a related pointing device, the trackball, was invented by Ralph Benjamin as a part of a World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called Comprehensive Display System. The trackball prototype used a metal ball rolling on two rubber-coated wheels. This device was patented in 1947 and was kept as a military secret. In 1952 another trackball was built by Kenyon Taylor, Tom Cranston, and Fred Longstaff while working on the Royal Canadian Navy’s DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving) system.
The History of the Mouse Both of the trackballs were similar in concept. It used four disks to pick up a motion, two for each X any Y directions. There were several rollers that provided the mechanical support so when the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun and contacts on their outer rim made periodic contact with wires, that produced a pulse of output with each movement of the ball. The physical movement of the ball could be determined by counting the pulses. In 1968 a mouse device called Rollkugel, which is German for rolling a ball. This device was released developed and published by the German company Telefunken. This device was based on an earlier trackball-like device of the same name that was embedded into radar flight control desk. Unlike other devices developed later, Telefunken already had a ball in their models. A few months’ after Telefunken began selling the Rollkugel, Douglas Engelbert released his demo mouse.
Douglas Engelbart & Bill English Douglas Engelbart was at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and invented his first mouse prototype in the 1960s with the help of his lead engineer Bill English. They called this device the mouse. The earlier models of the mouse had a cord attached to the rear part of the device, giving it a tail and resembled a mouse. SRI held the patent for Engelbart’s mouse so he never received any royalties for it before it became widely used in personal computers. Even though the mouse was a big step for Engelbart, it was just a small part of his larger project, which was aimed at augmenting human intellect. (Computer Mouse, n.d.) Engelbart came up with the idea of the mouse because he wanted to find an easy way for humans to interact with machines. His main goal was to was to find the simplest way for a user to point to and select something on a screen. There were dozens of options that were being used by researchers to move an on-screen cursor. Some of the options were light pens, joysticks, trackballs, trackpads, tablets with styli, and one device that users controlled with their knees.
Douglas Engelbart & Bill English Engelbart and English tested each of these devices and created a chart that listed each advantage and disadvantage. They found that the easiest device to use was the light pens but the disadvantage to that was that users had constantly picked up and put the device down. This helped Engelbart conceive an idea that had yet to be imagined. While at a conference in 1961 Engelbart remembered a device that had fascinated him for years. A device called a planimeter that could calculate the area of a space by being rolled around its perimeter. Using two perpendicular wheels, one that was horizontal and one that was vertical, that tote up the distance it was rolled in each direction. This gave Engelbart an idea and he began to sketch out ideas in his notebook. Engelbart then gave his sketch to English who then carved a piece of mahogany to make the first model.
The Mouse The device was simple. It could roll around a desktop and its two wheels would register higher or lower voltages as they turned in each direction. The voltage would then be transmitted through a cord to the computer screen and it would move the cursor in any direction. After they developed the first model they tried it on their focus group. It tested better than any device they tried. The only thing they changed was the placement of the cord from the front of the device to the back, like a tail. When Englebart was first developing the device he wanted to cram as many buttons as possible on to it. He ideally wanted up to ten buttons on the mouse. He was disappointed when he found out through testing that the optimum number of buttons it should have was three. During the next six years, Engelbart went on to devise a full-fledged augmentation system that he dubbed “oNLine System� or NLS. Which led to many other advances with the computer. (Isaacson, 2015)
Bill’s Ball Mouse In 1972, eight years later, Bill English went on to develop the mouse design further. He invented what we call the “ball mouse.” The wheels were replaced with a ball that was capable of monitoring movement in any direction. At the time English was working for Xerox Parc (Palo Alto Research Centre.) The mouse then became part of the groundbreaking Xerox Alto computer system, which happened to be the first minicomputer system that offered a graphical user interface. In would take another eight years before the mouse would be developed any further. Around 1980 an optical mouse was developed, which eliminated the ball that often became dirty after rolling around on a desktop. 1988 a US patent no. 4751505 was issued for an optical mouse invented by Lisa M. Williams and Robert S. Cherry. This mouse was sold commercially with Xerox products. (The History of the Computer Mouse, n.d.)
Works Cited Computer Mouse. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse Isaacson, W. (2015). The Innovators. New York: Simon & Schuster . The History of the Computer Mouse. (n.d.). Retrieved from Centre for Computer History: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/613/the-history-of-the-computer-mouse/