tech

The First Computer Mouse Was a Wooden Device

Douglas Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died on Tuesday night.

By Sadho Ram — 04 Jul 2013, 02:52 PM — Updated about 11 years ago

Cover image via

PHOTO: Here's how the very first computer mouse looked (1964)

The first mouse that drove the use of graphics user interface to a different height was a wooden device with wheels bulging it

Image via imgur.com

The mouse wasn’t commercially available until 1984, with Apple’s new Macintosh.

Douglas Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse and so much more, dies at 88

Douglas Engelbart, an internet pioneer and developer of the early computer mouse, passed away early this morning at the age of 88.

Douglas Carl Engelbart was born on January 30, 1925 in Portland to a radio repairman father who was often absent and a homemaker mother. He died of kidney failure.

A radar technician during World War II, Engelbart worked at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s. It was there that a vision of people sitting in front of a video screen, interacting with a computer, came to him.

Doug Engelbart designed the computer mouse, which first became commercially available in 1984, on the Apple Macintosh. Photograph by: Handout , Files

Image via vancouversun.com

During his lifetime, Engelbart made numerous groundbreaking contributions to the computing industry, paving the way for videoconferencing, hyperlinks, text editing, and other technologies we use daily.

Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the "mother of all demos."

It was described as: “An X-Y position indicator control for movement by the hand over any surface to move a cursor over the display on a cathode ray tube, the indicator control generating signals indicating its position to cause a cursor to be displayed on the tube at the corresponding position."

In the year 1973 this mouse was first used with the Xerox Alto computer system. However, because of its lack of success the first widely used mouse is credited to being the mouse found on the Apple Lisa computer.