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The mouse, the one attached
to your being
In 1963 Douglas Engelbart's group at Stanford Research
Institute in California studied interactive devices for displays.
Of the different devices tested - pointers, joysticks, trackballs
- a brown, wooden box with two rolling wheels and a red push button
on top achieved the best results. It would become the ubiquitous
computer mouse.
Engelbart's inspiration came from being a radar technician
during World War II. There he saw various types of computer input
devices, some even resembling the mouse. In 1959 he was granted
the opportunity to develope a new user interface for the computer.
By 1968 Engelbart and other computer scientists and electrical engineers
presented their invention at the Fall Joint Computer Conference
in San Fransisco. Amazingly, the mouse didn't catch on until the
1980s.
The first computer to come equipped with a mouse
was the Xerox Star, introduced in the early 1970s. However, the
mouse became popular only when it was included with the Apple Lisa
in 1983.
Englehart also came up with a larger, foot-operated
control called a rat, but it never caught on.
By the way, the plural for computer mouse is "mouse"
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