The First Mouse Was a Pine Box on Two Wheels
Engelbart's prototype rolled on perpendicular metal disks. He sketched it in a notebook in 1961 and never made a cent on the patent.
Doug Engelbart sketched the first mouse in a personal notebook in 1961, while sitting through a dull conference session on computer graphics. The working prototype, built at the Stanford Research Institute in 1964 by his colleague Bill English, was a hand-sized block of pine with a red button on top and two metal wheels mounted at right angles underneath. One wheel tracked horizontal motion, the other vertical. The cord came out the back, which is why someone in the lab started calling it a mouse.
Engelbart and English tested it against every other pointing device they could find: light pens, joysticks, a knee-controlled lever, a head-mounted tracker. The wooden box won on speed and accuracy in nearly every task. They published the results and filed for a patent in 1967, granted in 1970, assigned to SRI.
The world got its first look on December 9, 1968, in San Francisco, when Engelbart used the device on stage during what is now called the Mother of All Demos. In the same ninety minutes, he showed hypertext, real-time text editing, video conferencing, and shared-screen collaboration. The audience watched a future that would not arrive for another twenty years.
SRI later licensed the mouse patent to Apple for a reported $40,000. The patent expired in 1987, before the device became ubiquitous. Engelbart, who died in 2013, never received royalties on any of the billions sold.
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