Pictured are two computer “mice” that I have. The one on the right has a “tail” and must be plugged into a computer. The one on the left is a “tailless or wireless computer mouse. True confession — I only use the one with the tail. Have never gotten around to figuring out how to use the wireless one. Before my dad passed away, I remember him attempting to use a mouse. He never quite mastered the amount of pressure to apply to make things move on the screen and couldn’t scroll. It was just so completely different than any device he had ever used in his lifetime. I do remember when I first used a computer mouse. It was magic! It seemed so unlikely that a device which wasn’t a button on the computer or the keyboard was able to move things around on the screen. It truly felt like you were pulling motion out of thin air. That said, I believe it is one of the most functional pieces of equipment ever designed. It can scroll the page on the screen up and down. It can click on a button on the screen and make things happen. It can move things around on the screen. It can cut and paste text from one place to another. There really is no end to its usefulness. Let’s learn more about it.
According to Wikipedia, a computer mouse — plural mice, rarely mouses — is a handheld pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows a smooth control of the graphical user interface of a computer.
The first public demonstration of a mouse controlling a computer system was in 1968. Mice originally used two separate wheels to track movement across a surface — one in the X-dimension, and one in the Y. Later, the standard design shifted to utilize a ball rolling on a surface to detect motion. Most modern mice use optical sensors that have no moving parts. Though originally all mice were connected to a computer by a cable, some modern mice are cordless, relying on short-range radio communication with the connected system.
In addition to moving a cursor, computer mice have one or more buttons to allow operations such as selection of a menu item on a display. Mice often also feature other elements, such as touch surfaces and scroll wheels, which enable additional control and dimensional input.
Etymology
The earliest known written use of the term “mouse” in reference to a computer pointing device is in Bill English's July 1965 publication, "Computer-Aided Display Control," likely originating from its resemblance to the shape and size of a mouse or a rodent with the cord resembling its tail. The popularity of wireless mice without cords makes the resemblance less obvious.
The plural for the small rodent is always "mice" in modern usage. The plural for a computer mouse is either "mice" or "mouses" according to most dictionaries, with "mice" being more common. The first recorded plural usage is "mice;" the online “Oxford Dictionaries” cites a 1984 use, and earlier uses include J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device" of 1968.
History
The trackball, a related pointing device, was invented in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin as part of a post-World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called the Comprehensive Display System or CDS. He was then working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service. His project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. He felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented what they called a "roller ball" for this purpose.
The device was patented in 1947, but only a prototype using a metal ball rolling on two rubber-coated wheels was ever built, and the device was kept as a military secret.
Another early trackball was built by Kenyon Taylor, a British electrical engineer working in collaboration with Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff. Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR or Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving system in 1952.
DATAR was similar in concept to Benjamin's display. The trackball used four disks to pick up motion, two each for the X and Y directions. Several rollers provided mechanical support. When the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun and contacts on their outer rim made periodic contact with wires, producing pulses of output with each movement of the ball. By counting the pulses, the physical movement of the ball could be determined. A digital computer calculated the tracks and sent the resulting data to other ships in a task force using pulse-code modulation radio signals. This trackball used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, since it was a secret military project.
Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute — now SRI International — has been credited in published books by Thierry Bardini, Paul Ceruzzi, Howard Rheingold and several others as the inventor of the computer mouse. Engelbart was also recognized as such in various obituary titles after his death in July 2013.
By 1963, Engelbart had already established a research lab at SRI, the Augmentation Research Center or ARC to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software computer technology to "augment" human intelligence. That November, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data. On November 14, 1963, he first recorded his thoughts in his personal notebook about something he initially called a "bug," which in a "3-point" form could have a "drop point and 2 orthogonal wheels." He wrote that the "bug" would be "easier" and "more natural" to use, and unlike a stylus, it would stay still when let go, which meant it would be "much better for coordination with the keyboard."
In 1964, Bill English joined ARC, where he helped Engelbart build the first mouse prototype. They christened the device the “mouse” as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device which looked like a tail, and in turn resembled the common mouse. As noted above, this "mouse" was first mentioned in print in a July 1965 report, on which English was the lead author. On December 9, 1968, Engelbart publicly demonstrated the mouse at what would come to be known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his employer SRI held the patent, which expired before the mouse became widely used in personal computers. In any event, the invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much larger project of augmenting human intellect.
Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System or NLS exploited different body movements — for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose — but ultimately the mouse won out because of its speed and convenience. The first mouse, a bulky device, used two potentiometers perpendicular to each other and connected to wheels: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. At the time of the "Mother of All Demos," Engelbart's group had been using their second generation, three-button mouse for about a year.
On October 2, 1968, a mouse device named "Rollkugel" — German for "rolling ball" — was described as an optional device for its SIG-100 terminal. It was developed by the German company Telefunken. As the name suggests and unlike Engelbart's mouse, the Telefunken model already had a ball. It was based on an earlier trackball-like device — also named Rollkugel — that was embedded into radar flight control desks. This trackball had been developed by a team led by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken Konstanz for the German Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung or Federal Air Traffic Control as part of their TR 86 process computer system with its SIG 100-86 vector graphics terminal.
When the development for the Telefunken main frame TR 440 began in 1965, Mallebrein and his team came up with the idea of "reversing" the existing Rollkugel into a moveable mouse-like device, so that customers did not have to be bothered with mounting holes for the earlier trackball device. Together with light pens and trackballs, it was offered as an optional input device for their system since 1968. Footage exists from January 1969 — filmed at Abbey Road studios — of Ringo Starr holding what appears to be a mouse, possibly using it as a remote, to start or stop a recording machine. Some Rollkugel mouses installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich in 1972 are well preserved in a museum. Telefunken considered the invention too unimportant to apply for a patent on it.
The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use in 1973 and is regarded as the first modern computer to utilize a mouse. Inspired by PARC's Alto, the Lilith — a computer which had been developed by a team around Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich between 1978 and 1980 — provided a mouse as well. The third marketed version of an integrated mouse shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation came with the Xerox
8010 Star in 1981.
By 1982, the Xerox 8010 was probably the best-known computer with a mouse. The Sun-1 also came with a mouse, and the forthcoming Apple Lisa was rumored to use one, but the peripheral remained obscure; Jack Hawley of The Mouse House reported that one buyer for a large organization believed at first that his company sold lab mice. Hawley, who manufactured mice for Xerox, stated that "Practically, I have the market all to myself right now;" a Hawley mouse cost $415. In 1982, Logitech introduced the P4 Mouse at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, its first hardware mouse. That same year Microsoft made the decision to make the MS-DOS program Microsoft Word mouse-compatible and developed the first PC-compatible mouse. Microsoft's mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginning the Microsoft Hardware division of the company. However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the appearance of the Macintosh 128K — which included an updated version of the single-button Lisa Mouse — in 1984 and of the Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST in 1985.
Mechanical mice
Legend for drawing of opto-mechanical mouse:
1. Moving the mouse turns the ball.
2. X and Y rollers grip the ball and transfer
movement.
3. Optical encoding disks include light
holes.
4. Infrared LEDs shine through the disks.
5. Sensors gather light pulses to convert to
X and Y vectors.
The ball mouse replaced the external wheels with a single ball that could rotate in any direction. It came as part of the hardware package of the Xerox Alto computer. Perpendicular chopper wheels housed inside the mouse's body chopped beams of light on the way to light sensors, thus detecting in their turn the motion of the ball. This variant of the mouse resembled an inverted trackball and became the predominant form used with personal computers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The Xerox PARC group also settled on the modern technique of using both hands to type on a full-size keyboard and grabbing the mouse when required.
The ball mouse has two freely rotating rollers. These are located 90 degrees apart. One roller detects the forward–backward motion of the mouse and other the left–right motion. Opposite the two rollers is a third one (white, in the photo, at 45 degrees) that is spring-loaded to push the ball against the other two rollers. Each roller is on the same shaft as an encoder wheel that has slotted edges; the slots interrupt infrared light beams to generate electrical pulses that represent wheel movement. Each wheel's disc has a pair of light beams, located so that a given beam becomes interrupted or again starts to pass light freely when the other beam of the pair is about halfway between changes.
Simple logic circuits interpret the relative timing to indicate which direction the wheel is rotating.
This incremental rotary encoder scheme is sometimes called quadrature encoding of the wheel rotation, as the two optical sensors produce signals that are in approximately quadrature phase. The mouse sends these signals to the computer system via the mouse cable, directly as logic signals in very old mice such as the Xerox mice, and via a data-formatting IC in modern mice. The driver software in the system converts the signals into motion of the mouse cursor along X and Y axes on the computer screen.
The ball is mostly steel, with a precision spherical rubber surface. The weight of the ball — given an appropriate working surface under the mouse — provides a reliable grip so the mouse's movement is transmitted accurately. Ball mice and wheel mice were manufactured for Xerox by Jack Hawley, doing business as The Mouse House in Berkeley, California, starting in 1975. Based on another invention by Jack Hawley, proprietor of the Mouse House, Honeywell produced another type of mechanical mouse. Instead of a ball, it had two wheels rotating at off axes. Key Tronic later produced a similar product.
Modern computer mice took form at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne or EPFL under the inspiration of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and at the hands of engineer and watchmaker André Guignard. This new design incorporated a single hard rubber mouseball and three buttons, and remained a common design until the mainstream adoption of the scroll-wheel mouse during the 1990s. In 1985, René Sommer added a microprocessor to Nicoud's and Guignard's design. Through this innovation, Sommer is credited with inventing a significant component of the mouse, which made it more "intelligent;" though optical mice from Mouse Systems had incorporated microprocessors by 1984.
Another type of mechanical mouse — the "analog mouse" now generally regarded as obsolete — uses potentiometers rather than encoder wheels and is typically designed to be plug compatible with an analog joystick. The "Color Mouse" — originally marketed by RadioShack for their Color Computer but also usable on MS-DOS machines equipped with analog joystick ports provided the software accepted joystick input — was the best-known example.
Optical and laser mice
Early optical mice relied entirely on one or more light-emitting diodes or LEDs and an imaging array of photodiodes to detect movement relative to the underlying surface, eschewing the internal moving parts a mechanical mouse uses in addition to its optics. A laser mouse is an optical mouse that uses coherent laser light.
The earliest optical mice detected movement on preprinted mousepad surfaces, whereas the modern LED optical mouse works on most opaque diffuse surfaces; it is usually unable to detect movement on specular surfaces like polished stone. Laser diodes provide good resolution and precision, improving performance on opaque specular surfaces. Later, more surface-independent optical mice use an optoelectronic sensor — essentially, a tiny low-resolution video camera — to take successive images of the surface on which the mouse operates. Battery-powered, wireless optical mice flash the LED intermittently to save power and only glow steadily when movement is detected.
Inertial and gyroscopic mice
Often called "air mice" since they do not require a surface to operate, inertial mice use a tuning fork or other accelerometer to detect rotary movement for every axis supported. The most common models — manufactured by Logitech and Gyration — work using two degrees of rotational freedom and are insensitive to spatial translation. The user requires only small wrist rotations to move the cursor, reducing user fatigue or "gorilla arm."
Usually cordless, they often have a switch to deactivate the movement circuitry between use, allowing the user freedom of movement without affecting the cursor position. A patent for an inertial mouse claims that such mice consume less power than optically based mice and offer increased sensitivity, reduced weight and increased ease-of-use. In combination with a wireless keyboard, an inertial mouse can offer alternative ergonomic arrangements which do not require a flat work surface, potentially alleviating some types of repetitive motion injuries related to workstation posture.
3D mice
Also known as bats, flying mice or wands, these devices generally function through ultrasound and provide at least three degrees of freedom. Probably the best known example would be 3Dconnexion "Logitech's SpaceMouse" from the early 1990s. In the late 1990s Kantek introduced the 3D RingMouse. This wireless mouse was worn on a ring around a finger, which enabled the thumb to access three buttons. The mouse was tracked in three dimensions by a base station. Despite a certain appeal, it was finally discontinued because it did not provide sufficient resolution.
One example of a 2000s consumer 3D pointing device is the Wii Remote. While primarily a motion-sensing device — that is, it can determine its orientation and direction of movement, Wii Remote can also detect its spatial position by comparing the distance and position of the lights from the IR emitter using its integrated IR camera. Since the nunchuk accessory lacks a camera, it can only tell its current heading and orientation. The obvious drawback to this approach is that it can only produce spatial coordinates while its camera can see the sensor bar. More accurate consumer devices have since been released, including the PlayStation Move, the Razer Hydra and the controllers part of the HTC Vive virtual reality system. All of these devices can accurately detect position and orientation in 3D space regardless of angle relative to the sensor station.
A mouse-related controller called the SpaceBall has a ball placed above the work surface that can easily be gripped. With spring-loaded centering, it sends both translational as well as angular displacements on all six axes, in both directions for each. In November 2010 a German company called Axsotic introduced a new concept of 3D mouse called 3D Spheric Mouse. This new concept of a true six degree-of-freedom input device uses a ball to rotate in 3 axes without any limitations.
Tactile mice
In 2000, Logitech introduced a "tactile mouse" known as the "iFeel Mouse" developed by Immersion Corp. that contained a small actuator to enable the mouse to generate simulated physical sensations. Such a mouse can augment user-interfaces with haptic feedback, such as giving feedback when crossing a window boundary. To surf the internet by touch-enabled mouse was first developed in1996 and first implemented commercially by the Wingman Force Feedback Mouse. It requires the user to be able to feel depth or hardness; this ability was realized with the first electrorheological tactile mice but never marketed.
Ergonomic mice
As the name suggests, this type of mouse is intended to provide optimum comfort and avoid injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis and other repetitive strain injuries. It is designed to fit natural hand position and movements to reduce discomfort.
When holding a typical mouse, the ulna and radius bones on the arm are crossed. Some designs attempt to place the palm more vertically, so the bones take more natural parallel position. Some limit wrist movement, encouraging arm movement instead, that may be less precise but more optimal from the health point of view. A mouse may be angled from the thumb downward to the opposite side — this is known to reduce wrist pronation. However, such optimizations make the mouse right- or left-hand specific, making more problematic to change the tired hand. Time has criticized manufacturers for offering few or no left-handed ergonomic mice: "Oftentimes, I felt like I was dealing with someone who’d never actually met a left-handed person before."
Another solution is a pointing bar device. The so-called roller bar mouse is positioned snugly in front of the keyboard, thus allowing bi-manual accessibility.
Gaming mice
These mice are specifically designed for use in computer games. They typically employ a wider array of controls and buttons and have designs that differ radically from traditional mice. They may also have decorative monochrome or programmable RGB LED lighting. The additional buttons can often be used for changing the sensitivity of the mouse or they can be assigned or programmed to macros i.e., for opening a program or for use instead of a key combination. It is also common for game mice — especially those designed for use in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft or in multiplayer online battle arena games such as Dota 2 — to have a relatively high sensitivity, measured in dots per inch or DPI, which can be as high as 25,600. Some advanced mice from gaming manufacturers also allow users to adjust the weight of the mouse by adding or subtracting weights to allow for easier control. Ergonomic quality is also an important factor in gaming mice, as extended gameplay times may render further use of the mouse to be uncomfortable. Some mice have been designed to have adjustable features such as removable and/or elongated palm rests, horizontally adjustable thumb rests and pinky rests. Some mice may include several different rests with their products to ensure comfort for a wider range of target consumers. Gaming mice are held by gamers in three styles of grip:
1. Palm Grip: the hand rests on the mouse, with extended fingers.
2. Claw Grip: palm rests on the mouse, bent fingers.
3. Finger-Tip Grip: bent fingers, palm doesn't touch the mouse.
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