The computer mouse turns 40

Back in 1963 Bill English constructed the first mouse prototype. The device used two perpendicular wheels attached to analog potentiometers to track movement and it only had one button. I bet it worked better than this crappy Sony mouse I have.

Macworld.com
From the halls of a university research lab to the desks of hundreds of millions of computer users, the computer mouse has come a long way. Douglas 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 1968 forty years ago Tuesday. During that unveiling, Engelbart presented what some have called “the mother of all demos,” outlining concepts that would presage the next 40 years of computing, including the use of a three-button palm-sized contraption called a “mouse.”
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Since then, a handful of companies (namely Xerox, Apple, Microsoft, and Logitech) have poured millions into refining the form and function of the mouse: they’ve changed its number of buttons, changed the interfaces by which mice connect to computers, and tinkered with new methods of tracking movement. But despite four decades of commercial evolution, computer users today handle the mouse in much the same way Engelbart did 40 years ago: as an ingeniously efficient and easy-to-use pointing device.

With the coming of this anniversary, some pundits have been quick to forecast the looming demise of the mouse at the hands of touch screens and speech recognition. But as long as computers require hands-on input from humans, we’ll probably have a nook on our desks reserved for our small electronic friends. Forty years later, the mouse has become an indispensable tool for computer input, and its excellence at certain tasks means that it will likely be with us for some time to come.

For more notable moments in mouse history, check out the MacWorld article.