Making personal computers usable: Enter the mouse
It is hard to believe that the mouse was actually invented almost 50 years ago, by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English at SRI. It wasn’t until years later that a mouse was used in connection with a multi-windowed desktop, most famously at Xerox PARC connected to the Xerox Alto — pictured here. It was a 1979 tour of PARC, and demonstration of Smalltalk-80 on the Xerox Alto, that helped give Steve Jobs and Apple Computer the idea to use a mouse-driven interface, first for the $10,000 Lisa computer in 1983 and then for the much less expensive, and of course much more successful, Macintosh introduced in 1984.
To make mice affordable for the consumer, relatively low-quality rubber ball-based versions were commonly used, instead of the more expensive early optical versions that required dedicated mouse pads with embedded lines. As time went on other kinds of optical mice, which could operate on ordinary surfaces, became affordable and are by far the most widely used today.
Engelbart, Xerox, Sun Microsystems, and eventually Microsoft Windows all adopted either 2-button or 3-button mice as standard, but Apple has consistently stuck with a simple design with a single button. Innovation on mice certainly hasn’t stopped at buttons, with the addition of scroll wheels, extra buttons, and even gyroscopic versions that can be run with hand waves pushing the designs forward.