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| A computer mouse (Plural mice, also mice) |
A
computer mouse (plural mice, also mouses) is a hand-held pointing
device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is
typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows a smooth
control of the graphical user interface of a computer.
The
first public demonstration of a mouse controlling a computer system was in 1968.
Mice originally used two separate wheels to track movement across a surface: one
in the X-dimension and one in the Y. Later, the standard design shifted to utilize
a ball rolling on a surface to detect motion. Most modern mice use optical sensors
that have no moving parts. Though originally all mice were connected to a computer
by a cable, many modern mice are cordless, relying on short-range radio communication
with the connected system.
In
addition to moving a cursor, computer mice have one or more buttons to allow operations
such as the selection of a menu item on a display. Mice often also feature other
elements, such as touch surfaces and scroll wheels, which enable additional control
and dimensional input.
Etymology
A computer mouse is named for its resemblance to a rodent.
The
earliest known written use of the term mouse in reference to a computer pointing
device is in Bill English's July 1965 publication, "Computer-Aided Display
Control", likely originating from its resemblance to the shape and size of
a mouse, a rodent, with the cord resembling its tail. The popularity of wireless
mice without cords makes the resemblance less obvious.
According
to Roger Bates, a hardware designer in English, the term also came about because
the cursor on the screen was for some unknown reason referred to as "CAT"
and was seen by the team as if it would be chasing the new desktop device.
The
plural for the small rodent is always "mice" in modern usage. The plural
for a computer mouse is either "mice" or "mouses" according
to most dictionaries, with "mice" being more common. The first recorded
plural usage is "mice"; the online Oxford Dictionaries cites a
1984 use, and earlier uses include J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a
Communication Device" of 1968.
History
Stationary trackballs
The
trackball, a related pointing device, was invented in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin as
part of a post-World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called the Comprehensive
Display System (CDS). Benjamin was then working for the British Royal Navy Scientific
Service. Benjamin's project used analog computers to calculate the future position
of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with
a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented
what they called a "roller ball" for this purpose.
The
device was patented in 1947, but only a prototype using a metal ball rolling on
two rubber-coated wheels was ever built, and the device was kept as a military secret.
Another
early trackball was built by Kenyon Taylor, a British electrical engineer working
in collaboration with Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff. Taylor was part of the original
Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking
and Resolving) system in 1952.
DATAR
was similar in concept to Benjamin's display. The trackball used four disks to pick
up motion, two each for the X and Y directions. Several rollers provided mechanical
support. When the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun, and contacts on their outer
rim made periodic contact with wires, producing pulses of output with each movement
of the ball. By counting the pulses, the physical movement of the ball could be
determined. A digital computer calculated the tracks and sent the resulting data
to other ships in a task force using pulse-code modulation radio signals. This trackball
used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, since it was
a secret military project.
Engelbart's first "mouse"
Inventor Douglas Engelbart holding the first computer mouse, showing the wheels that make contact with the working surface
Douglas
Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) has been credited
in published books by Thierry Bardini,[14] Paul Ceruzzi, Howard Rheingold, and several others as the inventor
of the computer mouse. Engelbart was also recognized as such in various obituary
titles after his death in July 2013.
By
1963, Engelbart had already established a research lab at SRI, the Augmentation
Research Center (ARC), to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software
computer technology to "augment" human intelligence. That November, while
attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to
ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X-
and Y-coordinate data. On 14 November 1963, he first recorded his thoughts in his
personal notebook about something he initially called a "bug", which in
a "3-point" form could have a "drop point and 2 orthogonal wheels".
He wrote that the "bug" would be "easier" and "more natural"
to use, and unlike a stylus, it would stay still when let go, which meant it would
be "much better for coordination with the keyboard".
The Engelbart mouse
In
1964, Bill English joined ARC, where he helped Engelbart build the first mouse prototype.
They christened the device the mouse as early models had a cord attached
to the rear part of the device which looked like a tail, and in turn, resembled the
common mouse. According to Roger Bates, a hardware designer in English, another
reason for choosing this name was because the cursor on the screen was also referred
to as "CAT" at this time.
Several
other experimental pointing - devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS)
exploited different body movements - for example, head-mounted devices attached
to the chin or nose – but ultimately the mouse won out because of its speed and
convenience. The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two potentiometers
perpendicular to each other and connected to wheels: the rotation of each wheel
translated into motion along one axis. At the time of the "Mother of All Demos",
Engelbart's group had been using their second-generation, 3-button mouse for about
a year.
First rolling-ball mouse
The ball-based Telefunken Rollkugelsteuerung RKS 100-86 from 1968
On
2 October 1968, three years after Engelbart's prototype but more than two months
before his public demo, a mouse device named Rollkugelsteuerung (German for "rolling ball control")
was shown in a sales brochure by the German company AEG-Telefunken as an optional
input device for the SIG 100 vector graphics terminal, part of the system around
their process computer TR 86 and the TR 440 [de] main frame. Based on an even earlier trackball device, the mouse
device had been developed by the company in 1966 in what had been a parallel
and independent discovery. As the name suggests and unlike Engelbart's mouse, the
Telefunken model already had a ball (diameter 40 mm, weight 40 g) and two mechanical
4-bit rotational position transducers with Gray code-like states, allowing easy
movement in any direction. The bits remained stable for at least two successive
states to relax debouncing requirements. This arrangement was chosen so that the
data could also be transmitted to the TR 86 front-end process computer and over
longer distance telex lines with c. 50 baud. Weighing 465 g, the device with a total
height of about 7 cm came in a c. 12 cm diameter hemispherical injection-molded
thermoplastic casing featuring one central push button.
The bottom side of the Telefunken Rollkugel RKS 100-86 shows the ball
As
noted above, the device was based on an earlier trackball-like device (also named
Rollkugel) that was embedded into radar flight control desks. This trackball
had been originally developed by a team led by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken Konstanz for the German Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung (Federal
Air Traffic Control). It was part of the corresponding workstation system SAP 300
and the terminal SIG 3001, which had been designed and developed in 1963. Development
for the TR 440 main frame began in 1965. This led to the development of the TR 86
process computer system with its SIG 100-86 terminal. Inspired by a discussion with
a university customer, Mallebrein came up with the idea of "reversing"
the existing Rollkugel trackball into a moveable mouse-like
device in 1966, so that customers did not have to be bothered with mounting holes
for the earlier trackball device. The device was finished in early 1968, and together
with light pens and trackballs, it was commercially offered as an optional input
device for their system starting later that year. Not all customers opted to buy
the device, which added costs of DM 1,500 per piece to the already up to 20-million
DM deal for the main frame, of which only a total of 46 systems were sold or leased.
They were installed at more than 20 German universities including RWTH Aachen, Technical
University Berlin, University of Stuttgart, and Konstanz. Several Rollkugel mice installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing
Centre in Munich in 1972 are well preserved in a museum, two others survived in
a museum at Stuttgart University, two in Hamburg, the one from Aachen at the Computer
History Museum in the US, and yet another sample was recently donated to the Heinz
Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF) in Paderborn. Anecdotal reports claim that Telefunken's
attempt to patent the device was rejected by the German Patent Office due to a lack
of inventiveness. For the air traffic control system, the Mallebrein team had already
developed a precursor to touch screens in the form of an ultrasonic-curtain-based pointing
device in front of the display. In 1970, they developed a device named "Touchinput-Einrichtung" ("touch input facility") based on a conductively
coated glass screen.
First mice on personal computers and
workstations
HP-HIL Mouse from 1984
The
Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use in 1973 and
is regarded as the first modern computer to use a mouse.[48] Inspired by PARC's
Alto, the Lilith, a computer that had been developed by a team around Niklaus Wirth
at ETH Zürich between 1978 and 1980, provided a mouse as well. The third marketed
version of an integrated mouse shipped as a part of a computer and intended for
personal computer navigation came with the Xerox 8010 Star in 1981.
By
1982, the Xerox 8010 was probably the best-known computer with a mouse. The Sun-1
also came with a mouse, and the forthcoming Apple Lisa was rumored to use one, but
the peripheral remained obscure; Jack Hawley of The Mouse House reported that one
buyer for a large organization believed at first that his company sold lab mice.
Hawley, who manufactured mice for Xerox, stated that "Practically, I have the
market all to myself right now"; a Hawley mouse cost $415. In 1982, Logitech
introduced the P4 Mouse at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, its first hardware
mouse. That same year Microsoft made the decision to make the MS-DOS program Microsoft
Word mouse-compatible and developed the first PC-compatible mouse. Microsoft's
mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginning the Microsoft Hardware division of the company.
However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the appearance of the Macintosh
128K (which included an updated version of the single-button Lisa Mouse) in 1984, and of the Amiga
1000 and the Atari ST in 1985.
Connectivity
and communication protocols
A Microsoft wireless Arc Mouse, marketed as "travel-friendly"
and foldable but otherwise operated exactly like other 3-button wheel-based optical
mice
To
transmit their input, typical cabled mice use a thin electrical cord terminating
in a standard connector, such as RS-232C, PS/2, ADB, or USB. Cordless mice instead
transmit data via infrared radiation (see IrDA) or radio (including Bluetooth),
although many such cordless interfaces are themselves connected through the aforementioned
wired serial buses.
While
the electrical interface and the format of the data transmitted by commonly available
mice is currently standardized on USB, in the past it varied between different manufacturers.
A bus mouse used a dedicated interface card for connection to an IBM PC or compatible
computer.
Mouse
use in DOS applications became more common after the introduction of the Microsoft
Mouse, largely because Microsoft provided an open standard for communication between
applications and mouse driver software. Thus, any application written to use the
Microsoft standard could use a mouse with a driver that implements the same API,
even if the mouse hardware itself was incompatible with Microsoft's. This driver
provides the state of the buttons and the distance the mouse has moved in units
that its documentation calls "mickeys".
Early mice
Xerox Alto mouse
In
the 1970s, the Xerox Alto mouse, and in the 1980s the Xerox optical mouse, used
a quadrature-encoded X and Y interface. This two-bit encoding per dimension had
the property that only one bit of the two would change at a time, like a Gray code
or Johnson counter, so that the transitions would not be misinterpreted when asynchronously
sampled.
The
earliest mass-market mice, such as the original Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST
mice used a D-subminiature 9-pin connector to send the quadrature-encoded X and
Y axis signals directly, plus one pin per mouse button. The mouse was a simple optomechanical
device, and the decoding circuitry was all in the main computer.
The
DE-9 connectors were designed to be electrically compatible with the joysticks popular
on numerous 8-bit systems, such as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600. Although
the ports could be used for both purposes, the signals must be interpreted differently.
As a result, plugging a mouse into a joystick port causes the "joystick"
to continuously move in some direction, even if the mouse stays still, whereas plugging
a joystick into a mouse port causes the "mouse" to only be able to move
a single pixel in each direction.
Apple Desktop Bus
Apple Macintosh Plus mice: beige mouse (left), platinum mouse
(right), 1986
In
1986 Apple first implemented the Apple Desktop Bus allowing the daisy chaining of
up to 16 devices, including mice and other devices on the same bus with no configuration
whatsoever. Featuring only a single data pin, the bus used a purely polled approach
to device communications and survived as the standard on mainstream models (including
a number of non-Apple workstations) until 1998 when Apple's iMac line of computers
joined the industry-wide switch to using USB. Beginning with the Bronze Keyboard
PowerBook G3 in May 1999, Apple dropped the external ADB port in favor of USB but
retained an internal ADB connection in the PowerBook G4 for communication with its
built-in keyboard and trackpad until early 2005.
Cordless or wireless
Cordless
or wireless mice transmit data via radio. Some mice connect to the computer through
Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, while others use a receiver that plugs into the computer, for
example through a USB port.
Many
mice that use a USB receiver have a storage compartment for it inside the mouse.
Some "nano receivers" are designed to be small enough to remain plugged
into a laptop during transport, while still being large enough to easily remove.
·
The Logitech Metaphor,
the first wireless mouse (1984). On display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL
·
An older Microsoft
wireless mouse made for notebook computers
· 
Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Mouse 3600
A wireless Apple mouse
Multiple-mouse
systems
Some
systems allow two or more mice to be used at once as input devices. Late-1980s era
home computers such as the Amiga used this to allow computer games with two players
interacting on the same computer (Lemmings and The Settlers for example). The same
idea is sometimes used in collaborative software, e.g. to simulate a whiteboard
that multiple users can draw on without passing a single mouse around.
Microsoft
Windows, since Windows 98, has supported multiple simultaneous pointing devices.
Because Windows only provides a single screen cursor, using more than one device
at the same time requires the cooperation of users or applications designed for multiple
input devices.
Multiple
mice are often used in multi-user gaming in addition to specially designed devices
that provide several input interfaces.
Windows
also has full support for multiple input/mouse configurations for multi-user environments.
Starting
with Windows XP, Microsoft introduced an SDK for developing applications that allow
multiple input devices to be used at the same time with independent cursors and
independent input points. However, it no longer appears to be available.
The
introduction of Windows Vista and Microsoft Surface (now known as Microsoft PixelSense)
introduced a new set of input APIs that were adopted into Windows 7, allowing for
50 points/cursors, all controlled by independent users. The new input points provide
traditional mouse input; however, they were designed with other input technologies
like touch and image in mind. They inherently offer 3D coordinates along with pressure,
size, tilt, angle, mask, and even an image bitmap to see and recognize the input
point/object on the screen.
As
of 2009, Linux distributions and other operating systems that use X.Org, such as
OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, support 255 cursors/input points through Multi-Pointer
X. However, currently, no window managers support Multi-Pointer X leaving it relegated
to custom software usage.
There
have also been propositions of having a single operator use two mice simultaneously
as a more sophisticated means of controlling various graphics and multimedia applications.
In
the marketplace
Computer mice built between 1986 and 2007
Around
1981, Xerox included mice with its Xerox Star, based on the mouse used in the 1970s
on the Alto computer at Xerox PARC. Sun Microsystems, Symbolics, Lisp Machines Inc.,
and Tektronix also shipped workstations with mice, starting in about 1981. Later,
inspired by the Star, Apple Computer released the Apple Lisa, which also used a
mouse. However, none of these products achieved large-scale success. Only with the
release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 did the mouse see widespread use.
The
Macintosh design, commercially successful and technically influential, led many
other vendors to begin producing mice or including them with their other computer
products (by 1986, Atari ST, Amiga, Windows 1.0, GEOS for the Commodore 64, and
the Apple IIGS).
The
widespread adoption of graphical user interfaces in the software of the 1980s and
1990s made mice all but indispensable for controlling computers. In November 2008,
Logitech built its billionth mouse.
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