Happy Birthday To 'Mouse'

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oi-Staff

By Staff

Tuesday, December 2, 2008, 12:38

It is the 'mouse's' birthday today. The little computer device that revolutionized the on-screen navigation was developed four decades ago and celebrated its 40th birthday today.

The first mouse, created by designer Douglas Engelbart who worked on the mouse at California's Stanford Research Institute, was a little wooden box with a single red button on top and a wire hanging from the back, because of which it was likened to a rodent. The mouse has remained the same more or less the same though the computer has become sleeker today.

The 83-year old Douglas Engelbart, is not a rich man giving orders in a huge IT firm. He never got any royalties because the patent expired before it became a must-have. It was in 1981 that Xerox included a mouse with their Star computer system, followed by Apple, which offered one with their Macintosh system, a few years later and then Microsoft made it the standard device for navigating their Windows system.

Today the modern mouse, hardly like its rubber trackball ancestor, has a more accurate infra-red technology and innovations like a second, third and fifth button. The latest version is also cordless, doing away with the reason they were called a mouse in the first place.

With Apple's innovative touchscreen technology on its iPhone and iPod Touch gadgets might just send the mouse into oblivion. "I very much doubt that we'll be using the mouse in 40 years' time," the Sun quoted Steve Prentice, an analyst at Gartner Research, as saying.