A
computer mouse is a
pointing device (hand control) 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 for fine control of a
graphical user interface.
Physically, a mouse consists of an object held in one's hand, with
one or more buttons.
Mice often also feature other elements, such as
touch surfaces and "wheels", which enable additional control and
dimensional input.
A computer mouse with the most common standard features: two buttons and a scroll wheel, which can also act as a third button.
Naming
The earliest known publication of the term
mouse as a computer pointing device is in
Bill English's 1965 publication "Computer-Aided Display Control".
[1]
The online
Oxford Dictionaries entry for
mouse states the plural for the small rodent is
mice, while the plural for the small computer connected device is either
mice or
mouses.
The dictionary's usage section states that the more common plural is
mice and claims the first recorded use of the plural is
mice[2] (though it cites a 1984 use of
mice when there were actually several earlier ones, such as
J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device" of 1968
[3]).
According to the fifth edition of
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language the plural can be either "mice" or "mouses".
[4]
History
The
trackball, a related pointing device, was invented in 1941 by
Ralph Benjamin as part of a
World War II-era
fire-control radar plotting system called
Comprehensive Display System (CDS).
Benjamin was then working for the British
Royal Navy Scientific Service. Benjamin's 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.
Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented a
ball tracker called "roller ball", for this purpose.
[5][6]
The device was patented in 1947,
[6]
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.
[5]
Another early trackball was built by British
electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor in collaboration with Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff.
Taylor was part of the original
Ferranti Canada, working on the
Royal Canadian Navy's
DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving) system in 1952.
[7]
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, as it was a secret military project as well.
[8][9]
Early mouse patents. From left to right: Opposing track wheels by Engelbart, Nov. 1970,
U.S. Patent 3,541,541. Ball and wheel by
Rider, Sept. 1974,
U.S. Patent 3,835,464. Ball and two rollers with spring by Opocensky, Oct.
Independently,
Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute (now
SRI International) invented his first mouse prototype in the 1960s with the assistance of his lead engineer
Bill English.
[10]
They christened the device the
mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail and generally resembling the common
mouse.
[11]
Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his employer SRI held
the patent, which ran out before it became widely used in personal
computers.
[12]
The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much
larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect via the
Augmentation Research Center.
[13][14]
Inventor
Douglas Engelbart holding the first computer mouse,
[15] showing the wheels that make contact with the working surface.
Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (
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.
[16]
The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two wheels
perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel translated into
motion along one
axis.
At the time of the "Mother of All Demos", Englebart's group had been
using their second generation, 3-button mouse for about a year.
On 2
October 1968, just a few months before Engelbart released
his demo on 9 December 1968, a mouse device named
Rollkugel (German for "rolling ball") was released that had been developed and published 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 had been
developed around 1965 by a team led by Rainer Mallebrein at Telefunken
Konstanz for the German
Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung as part of their TR 86 process computer system with its SIG 100-86
[17] vector graphics terminal.
The first ball-based computer mouse in 1968,
Telefunken Rollkugel RKS 100-86 for their
TR 86 process computer system.
When the development for the Telefunken main frame
TR 440 (de) 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 optional input device
for their system since 1968. Some samples, installed at the
Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Munich in 1972, are still well preserved.
[18][19]
Telefunken considered the invention too small to apply for a patent on their device.
The
Xerox Alto
was one of the first computers designed for individual use in 1973, and
is regarded as the grandfather of computers that utilize the mouse.
[20]
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 Information System in 1981.
By 1982 the Xerox 8010 was probably the best-known computer 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.
[21]
That 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
Microsoft hardware.
[22]
However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the 1984 appearance of the
Macintosh 128K, which included an updated version of the
Lisa Mouse[23] and the
Atari ST in 1985.
Operation
A mouse typically controls the motion of a
pointer
in two dimensions in a graphical user interface (GUI).
The mouse turns
movements of the hand backward and forward, left and right into
equivalent electronic signals that in turn are used to move the pointer.
The relative movements of the mouse on the surface are applied to the
position of the pointer on the screen, which signals the point where
actions of the user take place, so that the hand movements are
replicated by the pointer.
[24]
Clicking or hovering (stopping movement while the cursor is within the
bounds of an area) can select files, programs or actions from a list of
names, or (in graphical interfaces) through small images called "icons"
and other elements.
For example, a text file might be represented by a
picture of a paper notebook, and clicking while the cursor hovers this
icon might cause a text editing program to open the file in a window.
Different ways of operating the mouse cause specific things to happen in the GUI:
[24]
- Click: pressing and releasing a button.
- (left) Single-click: clicking the main button.
- (left) Double-click: clicking the button two times in quick succession counts as a different gesture than two separate single clicks.
- (left) Triple-click: clicking the button three times in quick succession.
- Right-click: clicking the secondary button.
- Middle-click: clicking the tertiary button.
- Drag and drop: pressing and holding a button, then moving the mouse without releasing. (Using the command "drag with the right mouse button"
instead of just "drag" when one instructs a user to drag an object
while holding the right mouse button down instead of the more commonly
used left mouse button.)
- Mouse button chording (a.k.a. Rocker navigation).
- Combination of right-click then left-click.
- Combination of left-click then right-click or keyboard letter.
- Combination of left or right-click and the mouse wheel.
- Clicking while holding down a modifier key.
- Moving the pointer a long distance: When a practical limit of mouse
movement is reached, one lifts up the mouse, brings it to the opposite
edge of the working area while it is held above the surface, and then
replaces it down onto the working surface. This is often not necessary,
because acceleration software detects fast movement, and moves the
pointer significantly faster in proportion than for slow mouse motion.
- Multi-touch: this method is similar to a multi-touch trackpad on a
laptop with support for tap input for multiple fingers, the most famous
example being the Apple Magic Mouse.
Mouse gestures
Users can also employ mice
gesturally; meaning that a stylized motion of the mouse cursor itself, called a "
gesture",
can issue a command or map to a specific action.
For example, in a
drawing program, moving the mouse in a rapid "x" motion over a shape
might delete the shape.
Gestural interfaces occur more rarely than plain
pointing-and-clicking; and people often find them more difficult to use,
because they require finer motor-control from the user.
However, a few
gestural conventions have become widespread, including the
drag and drop gesture, in which:
- The user presses the mouse button while the mouse cursor hovers over an interface object
- The user moves the cursor to a different location while holding the button down
- The user releases the mouse button
For example, a user might drag-and-drop a picture representing a file onto a picture of a
trash can, thus instructing the system to delete the file.
Standard semantic gestures include:
Specific uses
Other uses of the mouse's input occur commonly in special application-domains. In interactive
three-dimensional graphics,
the mouse's motion often translates directly into changes in the
virtual objects' or camera's orientation.
For example, in the
first-person shooter genre of games (see below), players usually employ
the mouse to control the direction in which the virtual player's "head"
faces: moving the mouse up will cause the player to look up, revealing
the view above the player's head.
A related function makes an image of
an object rotate, so that all sides can be examined. 3D design and
animation software often modally chords many different combinations to
allow objects and cameras to be rotated and moved through space with the
few axes of movement mice can detect.
When mice have more than one button, software may assign different functions to each button. Often, the primary (leftmost in a
right-handed
configuration) button on the mouse will select items, and the secondary
(rightmost in a right-handed) button will bring up a menu of
alternative actions applicable to that item.
For example, on platforms
with more than one button, the
Mozilla
web browser will follow a link in response to a primary button click,
will bring up a contextual menu of alternative actions for that link in
response to a secondary-button click, and will often open the link in a
new
tab or
window in response to a click with the tertiary (middle) mouse button.
Much More to be had on The Computer Mouse at Wikipedia.org
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Source:Wikipedia.org
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