thanks for watching tech wiki click the subscribe button then enable
notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so back in
the 1960s an animator slash business tycoon bought a bunch of land in Central
Florida turning it into a sprawling resort that specializes in wholesome
family fun at unreasonable price hahaha
no not that Mouse today's episode is
about the computer mouse and at first you might not think there's much history
to discuss because they didn't start becoming widespread on personal
computers until the mid to late 80s but it turns out that the concept of using
something other than those clunky arrow keys to move a cursor around predates
the modern mouse by several decades I'm talking about the trackball which sprang
into existence all the way back in 1946
as part of a british navy project to
help track aircraft on radar this
concept was later adapted by the canadian navy for their own tracking
system which used a small five pin bowling ball of all things for the ball
because presumably they couldn't get funding for a real one
anywho these early implementations were rather crude with the ball placed on top
of spinning metal discs that came into contact with wires but because the UK
considered it a military secret the idea
of using a spinning or rolling object as a computer input device wouldn't end up
being realized in the civilian world until years later when the first true
Mouse was invented in 1964 at Stanford
University now unlike modern mice which have total freedom of movement in one
plane this early Mouse only had two pizza cutter looking wheels that allowed
movement up and down or side to side but
not at the same time the inventors decided to call their creation a mouse
because the wire sticking out of the end looked like a rodents tail and they used
it in conjunction with the nls a DARPA
funded computer system that included clickable hyperlink remember this was
nearly 30 years before the internet started becoming widespread
soon after that the mouse was picked up by Xerox who developed a personal
computer called the alto in 1973 which used an actual graphical user
interface complete with mouse support and Xerox was actually also developing
ball mice while they worked on the alto which would allow users to move the
mouse in any direction they pleased these worked by keeping the ball in
contact with axles attached to wheels with holes in them as the mouse moved
the axles would turn the wheels causing beams of light to repeatedly break into
pulses which hit sensors that registered which way the mouse was moving this
design revolutionized the way we interact with our computers but Xerox
was and still is a company that's focused on producing products for
business rather than home use meaning that the mouse wasn't very well known
until Apple came along made a deal with Xerox to give them partial ownership of
Apple in return for the use of Xeroxes technology and then popularized the
device with the original Macintosh in 1984
even though Xerox had already switched to ball mice and Microsoft was already
selling them for use with word processors no doubt Apple's clever
marketing played a role in pushing a pre-existing technology into the
mainstream consciousness some things never do change am i right anyway aside
from changes in economics which gave mice a shape more suited to the hand
than that original plastic brick form the basic way that they worked didn't
really change between the mid 80s and the mid 90s though we did get laptops
with those little nub style pointing sticks and the first track pads in the
interim so users of external nice had to wait until 1966 for the first widespread
mouse with a scroll wheel even though
that concept had actually been realized back in 1985 with the Mighty Mouse
featuring a wheel on the side instead of the top that you controlled with your
thumb then the late 90s also brought an even bigger sea change optical mice like
the scroll wheel Mouse the optical mouse was first developed long before it hit
the market in fact early versions that used specific tracking surfaces were
actually invented back in 1980 when even
ball mice were relatively unknown but development of optical mice that could
work with generic surfaces like mouse pads table tops or your pants didn't
happen until much later and it also took awhile for component costs to come down
to the point where they were cheap enough to mass-produce when they finally
did appear on the consumer market in 1999 optical mice were still expensive
with some of Microsoft's early offerings retailing for around 70 US dollars in
fact the first ever gaming mouse the
Razer Boomslang also launched in 1999
but that one still used a mechanical ball the upsides to optical mice
included not only more accurate tracking than with a ball mouse but also better
reliability the optical sensors which worked by taking many photos of the
surface that the mouse sat on every second and then sending them to a chip
that would process those images to detect movement were much more resistant
to the dirt and gunk that all too often
fouled up mouse balls and degraded performance later in 2004 logitech
released a frickin laser mouse which
would not only incinerate your enemies but also sport even more accurate
tracking thanks to the use of a laser beam which could see surfaces under the
mouse with more precision than standard LEDs this was a boon for more serious PC
gamers that wanted the more granular tracking during the heat of battle and
other significant advances in Mouse technology began to be driven by gamers
over the coming years such as more powerful processors inside the mice
themselves so they could scan surfaces and process movement more frequently and
allowing users to adjust the sensitivity of the mouse on the fly for situations
that require precise aiming like we've seen with the ever-popular sniper button
now there have been other improvements too mice in recent years but they mostly
come in the form of adding more general technologies to mice to make them more
versatile like replacing ps2 with USB
which you can learn about here implementing scroll wheels that can
switch between smooth or clicky operation adding wireless data and even
charging support peppering them with programmable macro buttons adding the
ability to track on glass by scanning for small scratches and dust particles
and of course covering them with the oh so important RGB lighting that you know
that you crave so today then it's been a long time
since doug engelbart and bill english gave us their original wooden box on
wheels but the simplicity and intuitiveness of the mouse has ensured
its continuation as an extremely important input device even in the age
of touchscreens and voice control maybe
it'll finally be usurped by the development of something like a neural
interface but by that time we'll probably be dealing with a whole new set
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