Today, we’re going to try and guess what this mysterious object is.
Can you guess what this is? :)
It has something to do with computers…
The object in question was invented in the early 1960s by Douglas Engelbart, an American scholar of Dutch, German, Norwegian and Swedish descent. It is one of the most commonly used gadgets for personal computers.
Still no clue?
Any ideas?
Let us help. Our mysterious object is …
The first computer mouse in the world!
Like we said, Douglas Engelbart invented the first computer mouse in the early 1960s, filed the patent in 1967, and the patent was then awarded in 1970. His trusted collaborator, Bill English, built the first prototype in 1964 out of wood. The mouse had two wheels at the bottom of its body and its creators started calling it “mouse” because of the resemblance to a rodent.
The wheels could function something like the wheels on a planimeter – a tool used by engineers and geographers to measure areas on a map, blueprint, drawing, etc. – but in this case, rolling the wheels around on the tabletop would plot the x,y coordinates for a cursor on a computer screen.
As we can see, the mouse was much larger than what these devices look like today, and it had a little red button on top. Afterwards, Bill English replaced the wheels with a ball that could rotate in any direction, and in the 1980s, the first optical mouse was invented.