Mice

Mice

The invention of the mouse can be seen as the catalyst that allowed for such a rapid expansion of personal computers in people's homes. It was only once the mouse had been developed that the user interface could advance to a logical set of windows and menus which have come to be synonymous with the computer itself. The mouse was developed at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas C. Engelbart and William English during the period of 1963 to 1964 and was dubbed either 'X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System', or the somewhat easier on the tongue, 'bug'. The nickname mouse was due to the fact that in early models, the cable was taken out of the back of the device, rather resembling a tail. Bill English went on to improve the design of the mouse, replacing the two wheels Engelbert had used to track motion with a single ball. His device was used in the first computer system with a graphical user interface, the Xerox Alto, and then as the major selling point of the Apple Macintosh, which became the first consumer computer to use a GUI and a mouse as the standard input device. One of the breakthrough programs of the Macintosh was MacPaint, a program that could not have been possible were it not for the mouse. The mechanical mouse, as used in the early computers, employed a ball which would be rolled on the desk surface and roll two rollers enclosed in the mouse's body. These two rollers represent the X and Y axis and thus allow the movement of the mouse to be tracked in two dimensions, relating to the two dimensions of a display screen. Modern mice have been developed to use optical sensors. In such mice a light, often from a red LED, is shone on to the surface as it is scanned for changes, any changes are sent through complicated processors inside the mouse itself and translated to information the computer can use to position the pointer on the screen. Optical mice generally used four times the power required by a mechanical mouse, which makes their deployment in a wireless environment a little difficult. This prompted the development of the laser mouse and in 2004 the first commercial laser model was produced by Logitech. MIce can connect to the computer ina variety of ways, originally the mouse used the serial bus and then the PS/2 port, now it is more common to find mice with a USB connection. Wireless mice utilise either infrared or RF technology to communicate to a base station which can be as small as a USB memory stick. Bluetooth mice have also began to appear, for example the Mighty Mouse from apple. A basic mouse can be bought for as little as five pounds.

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