The trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project in 1952. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, as it was a secret military project.[2]
Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963,[3] with the assistance of his colleague Bill English. They christened the device mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device suggesting a tail and generally resembling the common mouse.[4] Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.[5]
The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect.[6]
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 simplicity and convenience. The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two gear-wheels perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. Engelbart received patent US3,541,541 on November 17, 1970 for an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System".[7] At the time, Engelbart envisaged that users would hold the mouse continuously in one hand and type on a five-key chord keyset with the other.[8] The concept was preceded in the 19th century by the telautograph, which also anticipated the fax machine.concats 00923224479031
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