The mouse was nearly beaten by a knee pedal and a bowling ball
Before settling on the mouse, Douglas Engelbart's lab tried pointers worked by the chin, the nose and a knee under the desk. An earlier Canadian navy tracker rolled a standard five-pin bowling ball. And in West Germany, Telefunken quietly sold a ball-based mouse two months before Engelbart's famous 1968 demonstration.
Trackballs came first, born of radar. Ralph Benjamin of the Royal Navy Scientific Service devised a roller ball in 1946 for plotting aircraft, patented it in 1947, and saw it kept secret as a prototype. In 1952 Kenyon Taylor's team at Ferranti Canada built one for the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR system, where discs spun by the bowling ball sent pulses a computer could count.
Engelbart, at the Stanford Research Institute, wanted to augment human intellect. At a graphics conference in November 1963 he sketched a device he called a bug, riding on two wheels at right angles, which unlike a pen would stay put when released. Bill English joined in 1964 and built the prototype, and his July 1965 report holds the first written use of mouse, likely from the cord looking like a tail. A colleague later added that the on-screen cursor was nicknamed CAT, which seemed to be chasing it. Engelbart unveiled it on 9 December 1968 in what became known as the Mother of All Demos. He never earned royalties; his employer held the patent, and it expired before mice went mainstream.
Telefunken's version grew from an air traffic control trackball designed by Rainer Mallebrein's team. In 1966 he flipped it over into a movable device with a ball inside, so customers would not need to cut mounting holes. It shipped in 1968 as an option for a mainframe of which only 46 were sold or leased, and the German patent office reportedly turned it down for lacking inventiveness.
The Xerox Alto of 1973 was the first modern computer built around a mouse, with a slanted cursor arrow designed by Alan Kay. Still, as late as 1982 one corporate buyer assumed a mouse supplier sold laboratory rodents. Logitech and Microsoft entered that year and the next, but the mouse became ordinary only with the Macintosh in 1984. Most now track optically, with no moving parts.
Source: Computer mouse
