Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!apple.com!casseres
From: casseres@apple.com (David Casseres)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: The Mouse -- What is its History?
Message-ID: <10592@goofy.Apple.COM>
Date: 5 Oct 90 22:33:45 GMT
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 63
References:<90274.094731ELE@psuvm.psu.edu> <26801@mimsy.umd.edu>

In article <26801@mimsy.umd.edu> folta@tove.cs.umd.edu (Wayne Folta) 
writes:
> An EXCELLENT article can be found in the IEEE Spectrum:
> 
>    "Of mice and menus: desiginin the user-friendly interface" in the
>    September 1989 IEEE Spectrum

For those who don't get around to reading the article, here are some 
dots on the timeline:  the mouse was invented in the early 60's by Doug 
Engelbart and his group at SRI.  This mouse was driven by two steel wheels 
set at right angles to each other; when the mouse was moved over a hard, 
smooth surface, each wheel could roll with one component of the motion and 
slide with the other.  The mouse was between 2 and 3 inches high, and the 
weight of the hand was supported by it (making it superior to modern mice, 
in my opinion).  It had three buttons.

Engelbart is not history; he is continuing his work at Stanford
University, and is still using the same basic mouse design.

The mouse technology went to Xerox PARC in the early 70's, where the mouse 
was flattened out by eliminating the wheels in favor of a ball, and later 
on, optical sensing.  The number of buttons was reduced to two, apparently 
because the PARC researchers felt the number 3 was too large to be grasped 
by the intellects of non-Computer-Science people.  (Okay, so that's an 
editorial comment...).

In the late 70's PARC decided to pass a lot of its stuff out to the world. 
Apple was among the first of the beneficiaries of this decision to market 
a mouse, having reduced the number of buttons to one, since the number 2 
is obviously too large to be grasped by the intellects of non-yuppie
people.

ANECDOTE:  Shortly before introduction of Apple's Lisa system, I had the 
privilege of demonstrating the Lisa to Doug Engelbart.  He showed up with 
a couple of his engineers, who immediately whipped out a small Phillips 
screwdriver, opened the mouse, and peered into its works.  They found no 
surprises.

Engelbart sat down and picked up the mouse, and said wryly, "Ah yes, the 
famous one-button mouse!"  Then he started feeling his way into the user 
interface.  He clicked a word with the mouse, and saw that it selected an 
insertion-point between two characters.  He did a drag, and selected 
several characters.  Then he asked me if there wasn't some way to select 
the word as an entity, without having to hit one end accurately and then 
drag accurately to the other end.

I told him, "Just point anywhere in the word and do a double-click: hit 
the button twice in rapid succession."  A look of pure technological 
amusement came over his face, and he tried it.  Then he said, "Gee!  Is 
there also a triple-click function?"  I admitted that there was, and he 
was even more amused.

AND A FOOTNOTE TO THE ANECDOTE:  Later, the people who were designing the 
Macintosh user interface decreed that there would be a double-click, but 
no triple-click, because "a triple-click is just too much."  Application 
developers, however, immediately began implementing triple-click functions 
in their own code.  After a while Apple itself implemented a triple-click 
function in the MPW shell.  Way back in those early 60's, Engelbart did a 
lot of research to come up with the three-button configuration, and it 
looks to me like he was right all along.

David Casseres
     Exclaimer:  Hey!