A billion mice
It is now almost 40 years since the invention first public demonstration of the mouse. The original name was something like “graphical user interface pointing device”. One story that I have heard is that the much shorter and quickly adopted tag of “mouse” was due to the young daughter of an engineer who visited dad at work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto, California where the mouse was invented. Can any reader verify this story? Or was it at the Xerox research lab (called PARC), also in Palo Alto?
By coincidence, I was on the Stanford University chemistry faculty when the mouse was invented but, alas, I was mostly unaware of the pioneering work going on at SRI, which was a separate institution from the university.
Neatly coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the mouse is Logitech’s reaching the total of one billion mice shipped. ExtremeTech reports:
At nearly the same time as the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of the computer mouse, which occurs next week, Logitech announced that it has shipped its billionth one of the ubiquitous little devices.
The palm-operated pointer was first demonstrated by inventor Doug Engelbart, and throughout its history it was popularized by several different computer operating systems. The most prevalent is, of course, the Windows family, but the first computer system to ship with a mouse was built by Xerox in 1981. According to Wikipedia, “Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the mouse in 1963 after extensive usability testing. He never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.”
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The first system to come with a mouse was the Alto, a prototype workstation created at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto California Research Center)in February 1973. A few thousand units were made. Although none were sold. They were used by scientists, administrators, and secretaries at PARC. Also, a number were given to Universities. The Alto was also the first unit to have a high-resolution bit-map CRT graphical display and an Ethernet LAN. Among other firsts, it had a WYSIWG wordprocessor program. To learn more do a Google search on “Alto Computer.”