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Importance of Computer Mouse

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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History of the computer mouse, introduction, enhanced productivity, precision and control, accessibility and ergonomics, customization and flexibility.

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Mice, windows, icons, and menus: these are the ingredients of computer interfaces designed to be easy to grasp, simplicity itself to use, and straightforward to describe. The mouse is a pointer. Windows divide up the screen. Icons symbolize application programs and data. Menus list choices of action.

But the development of today’s graphical user interface was anything but simple. It took some 30 years of effort by engineers and computer scientists in universities, government laboratories, and corporate research groups, piggybacking on each other’s work, trying new ideas, repeating each other’s mistakes.

This article was first published as “Of Mice and menus: designing the user-friendly interface.” It appeared in the September 1989 issue of IEEE Spectrum . A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The photographs and diagrams appeared in the original print version.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, many of the early concepts for windows, menus, icons, and mice were arduously researched at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) , Palo Alto, Calif. In 1973, PARC developed the prototype Alto , the first of two computers that would prove seminal in this area. More than 1200 Altos were built and tested. From the Alto’s concepts, starting in 1975, Xerox’s System Development Department then developed the Star and introduced it in 1981—the first such user-friendly machine sold to the public.

In 1984, the low-cost Macintosh from Apple Computer Inc ., Cupertino, Calif., brought the friendly interface to thousands of personal computer users. During the next five years, the price of RAM chips fell enough to accommodate the huge memory demands of bit-mapped graphics, and the Mac was followed by dozens of similar interfaces for PCs and workstations of all kinds. By now, application programmers are becoming familiar with the idea of manipulating graphic objects.

The Mac’s success during the 1980s spurred Apple Computer to pursue legal action over ownership of many features of the graphical user interface. Suits now being litigated could assign those innovations not to the designers and their companies, but to those who first filed for legal protection on them.

The GUI started with Sketchpad

The grandfather of the graphical user interface was Sketchpad [see photograph]. Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Ivan E. Sutherland built it in 1962 as a Ph.D. thesis at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. Sketchpad users could not only draw points, line segments, and circular arcs on a cathode ray tube (CRT) with a light pen—they could also assign constraints to, and relationships among, whatever they drew.

Arcs could have a specified diameter, lines could be horizontal or vertical, and figures could be built up from combinations of elements and shapes. Figures could be moved, copied, shrunk, expanded, and rotated, with their constraints (shown as onscreen icons) dynamically preserved. At a time when a CRT monitor was a novelty in itself, the idea that users could interactively create objects by drawing on a computer was revolutionary.

Sketchpad, created in 1962 by Ivan Sutherland at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, is considered the first computer with a windowing interface.

The Computer Museum

Moreover, to zoom in on objects, Sutherland wrote the first window-drawing program, which required him to come up with the first clipping algorithm. Clipping is a software routine that calculates which part of a graphic object is to be displayed and displays only that part on the screen. The program must calculate where a line is to be drawn, compare that position to the coordinates of the window in use, and prevent the display of any line segment whose coordinates fall outside the window.

Though films of Sketchpad in operation were widely shown in the computer research community, Sutherland says today that there was little immediate fallout from the project. Running on MIT’s TX-2 mainframe, it demanded too much computing power to be practical for individual use. Many other engineers, however, see Sketchpad’s design and algorithms as a primary influence on an entire generation of research into user interfaces.

The origin of the computer mouse

The light pens used to select areas of the screen by interactive computer systems of the 1950s and 1960s—including Sketchpad—had drawbacks. To do the pointing, the user’s arm had to be lifted up from the table, and after a while that got tiring. Picking up the pen required fumbling around on the table or, if it had a holder, taking the time after making a selection to put it back.

Sensing an object with a light pen was straightforward: the computer displayed spots of light on the screen and interrogated the pen as to whether it sensed a spot, so the program always knew just what was being displayed. Locating the position of the pen on the screen required more sophisticated techniques—like displaying a cross pattern of nine points on the screen, then moving the cross until it centered on the light pen.

In 1964, Douglas Engelbart , a research project leader at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., tested all the commercially available pointing devices, from the still-popular light pen to a joystick and a Graphicon (a curve-tracing device that used a pen mounted on the arm of a potentiometer). But he felt the selection failed to cover the full spectrum of possible pointing devices, and somehow he should fill in the blanks.

Then he remembered a 1940s college class he had taken that covered the use of a planimeter to calculate area. (A planimeter has two arms, with a wheel on each. The wheels can roll only along their axes; when one of them rolls, the other must slide.)

If a potentiometer were attached to each wheel to monitor its rotation, he thought, a planimeter could be used as a pointing device. Engelbart explained his roughly sketched idea to engineer William English, who with the help of the SRI machine shop built what they quickly dubbed “the mouse.”

This first mouse was big because it used single-turn potentiometers: one rotation of the wheels had to be scaled to move a cursor from one side of the screen to the other. But it was simple to interface with the computer: the processor just read frequent samples of the potentiometer positioning signals through analog-to-digital converters.

The cursor moved by the mouse was easy to locate, since readings from the potentiometer determined the position of the cursor on the screen-unlike the light pen. But programmers for later windowing systems found that the software necessary to determine which object the mouse had selected was more complex than that for the light pen: they had to compare the mouse’s position with that of all the objects displayed onscreen.

The computer mouse gets redesigned—and redesigned again

Engelbart’s group at SRI ran controlled experiments with mice and other pointing devices, and the mouse won hands down. People adapted to it quickly, it was easy to grab, and it stayed where they put it. Still, Engelbart wanted to tinker with it. After experimenting, his group had concluded that the proper ratio of cursor movement to mouse movement was about 2:1, but he wanted to try varying that ratio—decreasing it at slow speeds and raising it at fast speeds—to improve user control of fine movements and speed up larger movements. Some modern mouse-control software incorporates this idea, including that of the Macintosh.

The mouse, still experimental at this stage, did not change until 1971. Several members of Engelbart’s group had moved to the newly established PARC, where many other researchers had seen the SRI mouse and the test report. They decided there was no need to repeat the tests; any experimental systems they designed would use mice.

Said English, “This was my second chance to build a mouse; it was obvious that it should be a lot smaller, and that it should be digital.” Chuck Thacker, then a member of the research staff, advised PARC to hire inventor Jack Hawley to build it.

Hawley decided the mouse should use shaft encoders, which measure position by a series of pulses, instead of potentiometers (both were covered in Engelbart’s 1970 patent), to eliminate the expensive analog-to-digital converters. The basic principle, of one wheel rolling while the other slid, was licensed from SRI.

The ball mouse was the “easiest patent I ever got. It took me five minutes to think of, half an hour to describe to the attorney, and I was done.” —Ron Rider

In 1972, the mouse changed again. Ron Rider, now vice president of systems architecture at PARC but then a new arrival, said he was using the wheel mouse while an engineer made excuses for its asymmetric operation (one wheel dragging while one turned). “I suggested that they turn a trackball upside down, make it small, and use it as a mouse instead,” Rider told IEEE Spectrum . This device came to be known as the ball mouse. “Easiest patent I ever got,” Rider said. “It took me five minutes to think of, half an hour to describe to the attorney, and I was done.”

Defining terms

The pixel pattern that makes up the graphic display on a computer screen.

The motion of pressing a mouse button to Initiate an action by software; some actions require double-clicking.

Graphical user interface (GUI)

The combination of windowing displays, menus, icons, and a mouse that is increasingly used on personal computers and workstations.

An onscreen drawing that represents programs or data.

A list of command options currently available to the computer user; some stay onscreen, while pop-up or pull-down menus are requested by the user.

A device whose motion across a desktop or other surface causes an on-screen cursor to move commensurately; today’s mice move on a ball and have one, two, or three buttons.

Raster display

A cathode ray tube on which Images are displayed as patterns of dots, scanned onto the screen sequentially in a predetermined pattern of lines.

Vector display

A cathode ray tube whose gun scans lines, or vectors, onto the screen phosphor.

An area of a computer display, usually one of several, in which a particular program is executing.

In the PARC ball mouse design, the weight of the mouse is transferred to the ball by a swivel device and on one or two casters at the end of the mouse farthest from the wire “tail.” A prototype was built by Xerox’s Electronics Division in El Segundo, Calif., then redesigned by Hawley. The rolling ball turned two perpendicular shafts, with a drum on the end of each that was coated with alternating stripes of conductive and nonconductive material. As the drum turned, the stripes transmitted electrical impulses through metal wipers.

When Apple Computer decided in 1979 to design a mouse for its Lisa computer, the design mutated yet again. Instead of a metal ball held against the substrate by a swivel, Apple used a rubber ball whose traction depended on the friction of the rubber and the weight of the ball itself. Simple pads on the bottom of the case carried the weight, and optical scanners detected the motion of the internal wheels. The device had loose tolerances and few moving parts, so that it cost perhaps a quarter as much to build as previous ball mice.

How the computer mouse gained and lost buttons

The first, wooden, SRI mouse had only one button, to test the concept. The plastic batch of SRI mice bad three side-by-side buttons—all there was room for, Engelbart said. The first PARC mouse bad a column of three buttons-again, because that best fit the mechanical design. Today, the Apple mouse has one button, while the rest have two or three. The issue is no longer 1950—a standard 6-by-10-cm mouse could now have dozens of buttons—but human factors, and the experts have strong opinions.

Said English, now director of internationalization at Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, Calif.: “Two or three buttons, that’s the debate. Apple made a bad choice when they used only one.” He sees two buttons as the minimum because two functions are basic to selecting an object: pointing to its start, then extending the motion to the end of the object.

William Verplank, a human factors specialist in the group that tested the graphical interface at Xerox from 1978 into the early 1980s, concurred. He told Spectrum that with three buttons, Alto users forgot which button did what. The group’s tests showed that one button was also confusing, because it required actions such as double-clicking to select and then open a file.

“We have agonizing videos of naive users struggling” with these problems, Verplank said. They concluded that for most users, two buttons (as used on the Star) are optimal, if a button means the same thing in every application. English experimented with one-button mice at PARC before concluding they were a bad idea.

“Two or three buttons, that’s the debate. Apple made a bad choice when they used only one.” —William English

More than 1200 of the experimental Alto, developed in 1973 by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, were distributed to test its windows, menus, and mouse.

Xerox Corp.

But many interface designers dislike multiple buttons, saying that double-clicking a single button to select an item is easier than remembering which button points and which extends. Larry Tesler , formerly a computer scientist at PARC, brought the one-button mouse to Apple, where he is now vice president of advanced technology. The company’s rationale is that to attract novices to its computers one button was as simple as it could get.

More than two million one-button Apple mice are now in use. The Xerox and Microsoft two-button mice are less common than either Apple’s ubiquitous one-button model or the three-button mice found on technical workstations. Dozens of companies manufacture mice today; most are slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with minor variations in shape.

How windows first came to the computer screen

In 1962, Sketchpad could split its screen horizontally into two independent sections. One section could, for example, give a close-up view of the object in the other section. Researchers call Sketchpad the first example of tiled windows, which are laid out side by side. They differ from overlapping windows, which can be stacked on top of each other, or overlaid, obscuring all or part of the lower layers.

Windows were an obvious means of adding functionality to a small screen. In 1969, Engelbart equipped NLS (as the On-Line System he invented at SRI during the 1960s was known, to distinguish it from the Off-Line System known as FLS) with windows. They split the screen into multiple parts horizontally or vertically, and introduced cross-window editing with a mouse.

By 1972, led by researcher Alan Kay , the Smalltalk programming language group at Xerox PARC had implemented their version of windows. They were working with far different technology from Sutherland or Engelbart: by deciding that their images had to be displayed as dots on the screen, they led a move from vector to raster displays, to make it simple to map the assigned memory location of each of those spots. This was the bit map invented at PARC, and made viable during the 1980s by continual performance improvements in processor logic and memory speed.

Experimenting with bit-map manipulation, Smalltalk researcher Dan Ingalls developed the bit-block transfer procedure, known as BitBlt. The BitBlt software enabled application programs to mix and manipulate rectangular arrays of pixel values in on-screen or off-screen memory, or between the two, combining the pixel values and storing the result in the appropriate bit-map location.

BitBlt made it much easier to write programs to scroll a window (move an image through it), resize (enlarge or contract) it, and drag windows (move them from one location to another on screen). It led Kay to create overlapping windows. They were soon implemented by the Smalltalk group, but made clipping harder.

Some researchers question whether overlapping windows offer more benefits than tiled on the grounds that screens with overlapping windows become so messy the user gets lost.

In a tiling system, explained researcher Peter Deutsch, who worked with the Smalltalk group, the clipping borders are simply horizontal or vertical lines from one screen border to another, and software just tracks the location of those lines. But overlapping windows may appear anywhere on the screen, randomly obscuring bits and pieces of other windows, so that quite irregular regions must be clipped. Thus application software must constantly track which portions of their windows remain visible.

Some researchers still question whether overlapping windows offer more benefits than tiled, at least above a certain screen size, on the grounds that screens with overlapping windows become so messy the user gets lost. Others argue that overlapping windows more closely match users’ work patterns, since no one arranges the papers on their physical desktop in neat horizontal and vertical rows. Among software engineers, however, overlapping windows seem to have won for the user interface world.

So has the cut-and-paste editing model that Larry Tesler developed, first for the Gypsy text editor he wrote at PARC and later for Apple. Charles Irby—who worked on Xerox’s windows and is now vice president of development at Metaphor Computer Systems Inc., Mountain View, Calif.—noted, however, that cut-and-paste worked better for pure text-editing than for moving graphic objects from one application to another.

The origin of the computer menu bar

Menus—functions continuously listed onscreen that could be called into action with key combinations—were commonly used in defense computing by the 1960s. But it was only with the advent of BitBlt and windows that menus could be made to appear as needed and to disappear after use. Combined with a pointing device to indicate a user’s selection, they are now an integral part of the user-friendly interface: users no longer need to refer to manuals or memorize available options.

Instead, the choices can be called up at a moment’s notice whenever needed. And menu design has evolved. Some new systems use nested hierarchies of menus; others offer different menu versions—one with the most commonly used commands for novices, another with all available commands for the experienced user.

Among the first to test menus on demand was PARC researcher William Newman, in a program called Markup. Hard on his heels, the Smalltalk group built in pop-up menus that appeared on screen at the cursor site when the user pressed one of the mouse buttons.

Implementation was on the whole straightforward, recalled Deutsch. The one exception was determining whether the menu or the application should keep track of the information temporarily obscured by the menu. In the Smalltalk 76 version, the popup menu saved and restored the screen bits it overwrote. But in today’s multitasking systems, that would not work, because an application may change those bits without the menu’s knowledge. Such systems add another layer to the operating system: a display manager that tracks what is written where.

The production Xerox Star, in 1981, featured a further advance: a menu bar, essentially a row of words indicating available menus that could be popped up for each window. Human factors engineer Verplank recalled that the bar was at first located at the bottom of its window. But the Star team found users were more likely to associate a bar with the window below it, so it was moved to the top of its window.

Apple simplified things in its Lisa and Macintosh with a single bar placed at the top of the screen. This menu bar relates only to the window in use: the menus could be ‘‘pulled down” from the bar, to appear below it. Designer William D. Atkinson received a patent (assigned to Apple Computer) in August 1984 for this innovation.

One new addition that most user interface pioneers consider an advantage is the tear-off menu, which the user can move to a convenient spot on the screen and “pin” there, always visible for ready access.

Many windowing interfaces now offer command-key or keyboard alternatives for many commands as well. This return to the earliest of user interfaces—key combinations—neatly supplements menus, providing both ease of use for novices and for the less experienced, and speed for those who can type faster than they can point to a menu and click on a selection.

How the computer “icon” got its name

Sketchpad had on-screen graphic objects that represented constraints (for example, a rule that lines be the same length), and the Flex machine built in 1967 at the University of Utah by students Alan Kay and Ed Cheadle had squares that represented programs and data (like today’s computer “folders”). Early work on icons was also done by Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada, stemming from efforts to replace the recently legislated bilingual signs with graphic symbols.

But the concept of the computer “icon” was not formalized until 1975. David Canfield Smith, a computer science graduate student at Stanford University in California, began work on his Ph.D. thesis in 1973. His advisor was PARC’s Kay, who suggested that he look at using the graphics power of the experimental Alto not just to display text, but rather to help people program.

David Canfield Smith took the term icon from the Russian Orthodox church, where an icon is more than an image, because it embodies properties of what it represents.

Smith took the term icon from the Russian Orthodox church, where an icon is more than an image, because it embodies properties of what it represents: a Russian icon of a saint is holy and is to be venerated. Smith’s computer icons contained all the properties of the programs and data represented, and therefore could be linked or acted on as if they were the real thing.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1975, Smith joined Xerox in 1976 to work on Star development. The first thing he did, he said, was to recast his concept of icons in office terms. “I looked around my office and saw papers, folders, file cabinets, a telephone, and bookshelves, and it was an easy translation to icons,” he said.

Xerox researchers developed, tested, and revised icons for the Star interface for three years before the first version was complete. At first they attempted to make the icons look like a detailed photographic rendering of the object, recalled Irby, who worked on testing and refining the Xerox windows. Trading off label space, legibility, and the number of icons that fit on the screen, they decided to constrain icons to a 1-inch (2.5-centimeter) square of 64 by 64 pixels, or 512 eight-bit bytes.

Then, Verplank recalls, they discovered that because of a background pattern based on two-pixel dots, the right-hand side of the icons appeared jagged. So they increased the width of the icons to 65 pixels, despite an outcry from programmers who liked the neat 16-bit breakdown. But the increase stuck, Verplank said, because they had already decided to store 72 bits per side to allow for white space around each icon.

After settling on a size for the icons, the Star developers tested four sets developed by two graphic designers and two software engineers. They discovered that, for example, resizing may cause problems. They shrunk the icon for a person—a head and shoulders—in order to use several of them to represent a group, only to hear one test subject say the screen resolution made the reduced icon look like a cross above a tombstone. Computer graphics artist Norm Cox, now of Cox & Hall, Dallas, Texas, was finally hired to redesign the icons.

Icon designers today still wrestle with the need to make icons adaptable to the many different system configurations offered by computer makers. Artist Karen Elliott, who has designed icons for Microsoft , Apple, Hewlett-Packard Co., and others, noted that on different systems an icon may be displayed in different colors, several resolutions, and a variety of gray shades, and it may also be inverted (light and dark areas reversed).

In the past few years, another concern has been added to icon designers’ tasks: internationalization. Icons designed in the United States often lack space for translations into languages other than English. Elliott therefore tries to leave space for both the longer words and the vertical orientation of some languages.

More than two million of the Apple Macintosh (top), which brought the graphical user interface to personal computers, have been sold. Much of its application software is inconsistent, however: at least three different icons (bottom) can represent address files. The icons are found in Desktop Express from Dow Jones & Co., HyperCard from Apple Computer Inc., and MS Word from Microsoft Corp.

Apple Computer Inc.

The main rule is to make icons simple, clean, and easily recognizable. Discarded objects are placed in a trash can on the Macintosh. On the NeXT Computer System, from NeXT Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.—the company formed by Apple cofounder Steven Jobs after he left Apple—they are dumped into a Black Hole. Elliott sees NeXT’s black hole as one of the best icons ever designed: ”It is distinct; its roundness stands out from the other, square icons, and this is important on a crowded display. It fits my image of information being sucked away, and it makes it clear that dumping something is serious.

English disagrees vehemently. The black hole “is fundamentally wrong,” he said. “You can dig paper out of a wastebasket, but you can’t dig it out of a black hole.” Another critic called the black hole familiar only to “computer nerds who read mostly science fiction and comics,” not to general users.

With the introduction of the Xerox Star in June 1981, the graphical user interface, as it is known today, arrived on the market. Though not a commercial triumph, the Star generated great interest among computer users, as the Alto before it had within the universe of computer designers.

Even before the Star was introduced, Jobs, then still at Apple, had visited Xerox PARC in November 1979 and asked the Smalltalk researchers dozens of questions about the Alto’s internal design. He later recruited Larry Tesler from Xerox to design the user interface of the Apple Lisa.

With the Lisa and then the Macintosh, introduced in January 1983 and January 1984 respectively, the graphical user interface reached the low-cost, high-volume computer market.

At almost $10,000, buyers deemed the Lisa too expensive for the office market. But aided by prizewinning advertising and its lower price, the Macintosh took the world by storm. Early Macs had only 128K bytes of RAM, which made them slow to respond because it was too little memory for heavy graphic manipulation. Also, the time needed for programmers to learn its Toolbox of graphics routines delayed application packages until well into 1985. But the Mac’s ease of use was indisputable, and it generated interest that spilled over into the MS-DOS world of IBM PCs and clones, as well as Unix-based workstations.

Who owns the graphical user interface?

The widespread acceptance of such interfaces, however, has led to bitter lawsuits to establish exactly who owns what. So far, none of several litigious companies has definitively established that it owns the software that implements windows, icons, or early versions of menus. But the suits continue.

Virtually all the companies that make and sell either wheel or ball mice paid license fees to SRI or to Xerox for their patents. Engelbart recalled that SRI patent attorneys inspected all the early work on the interface, but understood only hardware. After looking at developments like the implementation of windows, they told him that none of it was patentable.

At Xerox, the Star development team proposed 12 patents having to do with the user interface. The company’s patent committee rejected all but two on hardware—one on BitBlt, the other on the Star architecture. At the time, Charles Irby said, it was a good decision. Patenting required full disclosure, and no precedents then existed for winning software patent suits.

Microsoft Corp.

Today more than a dozen separate graphical user interfaces run on a variety of personal computers and workstations. The Presentation Manager component of Operating System/2, jointly developed by Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp., is intended to run on several million IBM and compatible personal computers; this display shows that too many onscreen windows can impede clarity.

The most recent and most publicized suit was filed in March 1988, by Apple, against both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif. Apple alleges that HP’s New Wave interface, requiring version 2.03 of Microsoft’s Windows program, embodies the copyrighted “audio visual computer display” of the Macintosh without permission; that the displays of Windows 2.03 are illegal copies of the Mac’s audiovisual works; and that Windows 2.03 also exceeds the rights granted in a November 198S agreement in which Microsoft acknowledged that the displays in Windows 1.0 were derivatives of those in Apple’s Lisa and Mac.

In March 1989, U.S. District Judge William W. Schwarzer ruled Microsoft had exceeded the bounds of its license in creating Windows 2.03. Then in July 1989 Schwarzer ruled that all but 11 of the 260 items that Apple cited in its suit were, in fact, acceptable under the 1985 agreement. The larger issue—whether Apple’s copyrights are valid, and whether Microsoft and HP infringed on them—will not now be examined until 1990.

Among those 11 are overlapping windows and movable icons. According to Pamela Samuelson, a noted software intellectual property expert and visiting professor at Emory University Law School, Atlanta, Ga., many experts would regard both as functional features of an interface that cannot be copyrighted, rather than “expressions” of an idea protectable by copyright.

But lawyers for Apple—and for other companies that have filed lawsuits to protect the “look and feel’’ of their screen displays—maintain that if such protection is not granted, companies will lose the economic incentive to market technological innovations. How is Apple to protect its investment in developing the Lisa and Macintosh, they argue, if it cannot license its innovations to companies that want to take advantage of them?

If the Apple-Microsoft case does go to trial on the copyright issues, Samuelson said, the court may have to consider whether Apple can assert copyright protection for overlapping windows-an interface feature on which patents have also been granted. In April 1989, for example, Quarterdeck Office Systems Inc., Santa Monica, Calif., received a patent for a multiple windowing system in its Desq system software, introduced in 1984.

Adding fuel to the legal fire, Xerox said in May 1989 it would ask for license fees from companies that use the graphical user interface. But it is unclear whether Xerox has an adequate claim to either copyright or patent protection for the early graphical interface work done at PARC. Xerox did obtain design patents on later icons, noted human factors engineer Verplank. Meanwhile, both Metaphor and Sun Microsystems have negotiated licenses with Xerox for their own interfaces.

To Probe Further

The September 1989 IEEE Computer contains an article, “The Xerox ‘Star’: A Retrospective,” by Jeff Johnson et al., covering development of the Star. “Designing the Star User Interface,’’ [PDF] by David C. Smith et al., appeared in the April 1982 issue of Byte .

The Sept. 12, 1989, PC Magazine contains six articles on graphical user interfaces for personal computers and workstations. The July 1989 Byte includes ‘‘A Guide to [Graphical User Interfaces),” by Frank Hayes and Nick Baran, which describes 12 current interfaces for workstations and personal computers. “The Interface of Tomorrow, Today,’’ by Howard Reingold, in the July 10, 1989, InfoWorld does the same. “The interface that launched a thousand imitations,” by Richard Rawles, in the March 21, 1989, MacWeek covers the Macintosh interface.

The human factors of user interface design are discussed in The Psychology of Everyday Things , by Donald A. Norman (Basic Books Inc., New York, 1988). The January 1989 IEEE Software contains several articles on methods, techniques, and tools for designing and implementing graphical interfaces. The Way Things Work , by David Macaulay (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1988), contains a detailed drawing of a ball mouse.

The October 1985 IEEE Spectrum covered Xerox PARC’s history in “Research at Xerox PARC: a founder’s assessment,” by George Pake (pp. 54-61) and “Inside the PARC: the ‘information architects,’“ by Tekla Perry and Paul Wallich (pp. 62-75).

William Atkinson received patent no. 4,464,652 for the pulldown menu system on Aug. 8, 1984, and assigned it to Apple. Gary Pope received patent no. 4,823,108 , for an improved system for displaying images in “windows” on a computer screen, on April 18, 1989, and assigned it to Quarterdeck Office Systems.

The wheel mouse patent, no. 3,541,541 , “X-Y position indicator for a display system,” was issued to Douglas Engelbart on Nov. 17, 1970, and assigned to SRI International. The ball mouse patent, no. 3,835,464 , was issued to Ronald Rider on Sept. 10, 1974, and assigned to Xerox.

The first selection device tests to include a mouse are covered in “Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation,” by William English, Douglas Engelbart, and Melvyn Berman, in IEEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics , March 1967.

Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System , by Ivan E. Sutherland (Garland Publishing Inc., New York City and London, 1980), reprints his 1963 Ph.D. thesis.

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Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum . Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.

John Voelcker is the former editor of Green Car Reports. As well as regularly contributing to IEEE Spectrum he has covered auto technologies and energy policy for numerous outlets, including Wired and Popular Science .

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Computer mice

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: March 1, 2022.

O nce upon a time, if you'd seen a mouse in your room you might have screamed and jumped up on the desk. Today, the mouse has jumped on your desk instead: it's the handy little pointer that makes your computer easy to use. The first mouse was made of wood and designed over four decades ago in 1961. Today, mice sell by the million and hardly a computer ships without one. They've changed quite a bit in that time but they still work in much the same way. Let's take a look inside!

What is a computer mouse?

A mouse is something you push along your desktop to make a cursor (pointing device) move on your screen. So what a mouse has to do is figure out how much you're moving your hand and in which direction. There are two main kinds of mice and they do this job in two different ways, either using a rolling rubber ball (in a ball-type mouse) or by bouncing a light off your desk (in an optical mouse).

Inside a ball-style computer mouse

Traditional mice have a rubber ball inside them. Open one up and you can see the heavy ball clearly and the spring that keeps it in position. Here's the inside of an old-style Logitech ball mouse:

How a ball computer mouse works

How do the wheels measure distance, how do they figure out direction.

There are various problems with mice like this. They don't work on all surfaces. Ideally, you need a special mouse mat but, even if you have one, the rubber ball and its rollers gradually pick up dirt, so the x- and y-axis wheels turn erratically and make the pointer stutter across your screen. One solution is to keep taking your mouse to pieces and cleaning it; another option is to get yourself an optical mouse.

How an optical mouse works

An optical mouse works in a completely different way. It shines a bright light down onto your desk from an LED (light-emitting diode) mounted on the bottom of the mouse. The light bounces straight back up off the desk into a photocell (photoelectric cell), also mounted under the mouse, a short distance from the LED. The photocell has a lens in front of it that magnifies the reflected light, so the mouse can respond more precisely to your hand movements. As you push the mouse around your desk, the pattern of reflected light changes, and the chip inside the mouse uses this to figure out how you're moving your hand.

Inside an optical computer mouse

How does a wireless mouse work, what if you can't use a mouse, who invented the computer mouse.

For most of their history , computers were the province of scientists and mathematicians. You needed a math degree just to understand the manual and you could only tell them what to do by feeding in a stack of index cards punched with holes. All that started to change when a brilliant US computer scientist named Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) invented the computer mouse. Engelbart realized computers were far too useful just for boffins: he could see they had the power to change people's lives. But he could also see that they needed to be much easier to use. So, during the 1960s, he pioneered most of the easy-to-use computer technologies that we now take for granted, including on-screen word processing, hypertext (the way of linking documents together used in web pages like these), windows (so you can have more than one document or program in view at a time), and video conferencing.

But he's still best known for inventing the mouse, or the "X-Y Position Indicator" as it was originally known. That stuffy name was dropped when someone spotted that the cable hanging out looked just like a mouse's tail. From then on, Engelbart's invention was known simply as the "mouse".

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On other sites

For more about the history of computer mice, take a look at

• Douglas C. Engelbart : A biography from Marc Weber posted shortly after Douglas Engelbart's death in 2013.
• History in Pix : A history of Douglas Engelbart's invention, from his personal website.
• MouseSite : An archive of Douglas Engelbart's late 1950s and 1960s research at Stanford Research Institute, including his original demonstrations of the computer mouse. [Archived via the Wayback Machine.]
• Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, the Augmentation of Human Intellect and the Genesis of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini. Stanford University Press, 2000. How Douglas Engelbart's invention of the mouse ushered in the modern-age of friendly personal computers.
• Human Computer Interaction by Alan Dix et al. Pearson Education, 2008. Comprehensive introduction to the design of the man-machine interface.
• Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse by John Markoff. The New York Times. July 3, 2013. An obituary for Doug Engelbart and an assessment of his life's work. Doug Engelbart Obituary by Jack Schofield, The Guardian, July 4, 2013, is an alternative take.
• Encounters with HCI Pioneers by Ben Shneiderman. Interviews with towering figures from the 20th century (including Doug Engelbart) who made computers intuitively easy to use.
• The Evolution of the Computer Mouse by Rob Beschizza, Wired, March 19, 2007. This article explores how mice have developed, from the original wooden Engelbart model through to more modern versions made by Apple and Logitech.
• The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: The Computer Mouse in the History of Computing by Paul Atkinson, Design Issues, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer 2007, pp.46–61. How mice developed, from ancient wooden Engelbart models to the modern plastic ones we use today.

Practical tips

• US Patent 3,541,541: X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System : Douglas Engelbart's original mouse patent, filed June 21, 1967 and granted November 17, 1970.
• US Patent 4,464,652: Cursor control device for use with display systems by William F. Lapson and William D. Atkinson, Apple Computer, Inc. Granted August 7, 1984. This early Apple mouse patent describes the detailed design of a classic ball mouse, like the one above.
• US Patent 4,886,941: Circuit for interfacing mouse input device to computer system by Hedley Davis and Robert Raible, Commodore Business Machines, Inc. Granted December 12, 1989. This one goes into some detail about how analog mouse movements are translated into digitally detectable pulses.

Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2007, 2020. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use .

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August 18, 2009

The Origin of the Computer Mouse

Now an endangered species, it was crucial to the development of personal computing and the Internet

By Larry Greenemeier

A little more than 40 years ago Douglas Engelbart introduced his "X–Y position indicator for a display system"—more commonly known today as the computer mouse—during a 90-minute presentation on a "computer-based, interactive, multiconsole display system" at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, Calif. This event—attended by some 1,000 computer professionals—would later be called by many the "mother of all demos" and would introduce a number of computing capabilities largely taken for granted today: the mouse, hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking.

Engelbart, now 84, filed the patent in 1967 but had to wait three years for the U.S. to acknowledge his technology, which provided the tool needed to navigate graphics-filled computer screens with a simple motion of the hand rather than by wading through screens filled with green-tinted text using keys or a light pencil pressed up against a computer monitor. "I don't know why we call it a mouse," he said during the demo. "It started that way, and we never did change it."

The original mouse , housed in a wooden box twice as high as today's mice and with three buttons on top, moved with the help of two wheels on its underside rather than a rubber trackball. The wheels—one for the horizontal and another for the vertical—sat at right angles. When the mouse was moved, the vertical wheel rolled along the surface while the horizontal wheel slid sideways. Mice grew more ergonomic over time and have adopted trackballs, lasers and LEDs, but the premise is the same—the computer records both the distance and speed at which the mouse travels and turns that information into binary code that it can understand and plot on a display screen.

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Engelbart originally invented the mouse as a way to navigate his oNLine System (NLS) , a precursor of the Internet that allowed computer users to share information stored on their computers. NLS, which Engelbart developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—now DARPA), was also the first system to successfully use hypertext to link files (making information available through a click of the mouse).

Because his patent for the mouse expired before it became widely used with personal computers in the mid-1980s, Engelbart garnered neither widespread recognition nor royalties for his invention . Mouse technology found its way from Engelbart's lab to the Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1971, when Bill English , a computer engineer who had worked for Engelbart at SRI, joined PARC. Xerox was the first to sell a computer system that came with a mouse—the 8010 Star Information System in 1981, but the term "mouse" wouldn't become a part of the modern lexicon until Apple made it standard equipment with its original Macintosh, which debuted in 1984. The emergence of the Microsoft Windows operating system and Web browsers hastened the mouse's pervasiveness throughout the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century.

Engelbart's own work at SRI came to an end in 1989, when McDonnell Douglas Corp. (his ultimate employer there after his division at SRI had changed owners a few times) shut down his lab. That year, Engelbart formed the Bootstrap Institute (now known as the Doug Engelbart Institute ) , a consulting firm in Menlo Park through which he still encourages researchers to share findings and build on one another's achievements.

Logitech claims to have manufactured one billion mice, which "speaks volumes for the success of this pointing device and the dominance of the graphical user interface of which it is an integral part," Gartner Blog Network analyst Steve Prentice blogged in December . Still, he adds, mice don't factor into a future where touch-screen smart phones, touch-pad laptops and video game controllers with embedded accelerometers (such as those shipped with Nintendo's Wii) rule the day. His prediction: the mouse is an endangered species with less than five years before it joins the ranks of the green screen, punch cards and other computer technologies now honorably retired to technology museums after years of faithful service on desktops everywhere.

Who Invented the Computer Mouse?

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It was technology visionary and inventor Douglas Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) who revolutionized the way computers worked, turning it from a piece of specialized machinery that only a trained scientist could use to a user-friendly tool that almost anyone can work with. During his lifetime, he invented or contributed to several interactive and user-friendly devices such as the computer mouse, Windows operating system, computer video teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, email, the  Internet  and much more.

Making Computing Less Cumbersome

Most of all, though, he was known for inventing the computer mouse. Engelbart conceived of the rudimentary mouse while attending a conference on computer graphics, where he started thinking about how to improve interactive computing. In the early days of computing, users typed codes and commands to make things happen on monitors. Engelbart thought an easier way was to link the computer’s cursor to a device with two wheels—one horizontal and one vertical. Moving the device on a horizontal surface would allow the user to position the cursor on the screen.

Engelbart’s collaborator on the mouse project Bill English built a prototype—a hand-held device carved out of wood, with a button on the top. In 1967, Engelbart’s company SRI filed for the  patent on the mouse , although the paperwork identified it a little differently as "x,y position indicator for a display system." The patent was awarded in 1970.

Computer Mice Hits the Market

Before long, computers designed to work with a mouse were released. Among the first was the Xerox Alto, which went on sale in 1973. A team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich liked the concept as well and built their own computer system with a mouse called the Lilith computer, sold from 1978 to 1980. Perhaps thinking they were on to something, Xerox soon followed up with the Xerox 8010, which featured a mouse, ethernet networking and e-mail among various innovative technologies that have since become standard.   

But it wasn't until 1983 that the mouse started to go mainstream. It was that year that Microsoft updated the MS-DOS program Microsoft Word to make it mouse-compatible and developed the first PC-compatible mouse. Computer manufacturers such as Apple , Atari and Commodore would all follow suit by debuting mouse compatible systems as well.  

Tracking Ball and Other Advancements

Like other present forms of computer technology, the mouse has evolved significantly. In 1972, English developed the “track ball mouse” that allowed users to control the cursor by rotating a ball from a fixed position. One interesting enhancement is technology that enables wireless devices, a fact that makes Engelbart's recollection of an early prototype almost quaint.

"We turned it around so the tail came out the top. We started with it going the other direction, but the cord got tangled when you moved your arm," he said. 

For an inventor who grew up on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon and had hoped his achievements would add to the collective intelligence of the world, the mouse has come a long way. "It would be wonderful,” he said, “if I can inspire others, who are struggling to realize their dreams, to say 'if this country kid could do it, let me keep slogging away.'" 

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10 Lines Essay On Computer Mouse In English For Students

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Essay On Mouse: The Evolution Of The Computer Mouse

Essay On Mouse: The computer mouse is a vital component of computing technology that has revolutionized the way we interact with computers. It was first invented in the 1960s, and since then, it has become an indispensable tool for navigating user interfaces and interacting with computer software. This Essay On Mouse will explore the history and origin of the computer mouse, its anatomy, types, usage, common problems, and solutions, as well as the future of mouse technology.

Table of Contents

Essay On Mouse

In this blog Essay On Mouse, we include About Essay On Mouse, in 100, 200, 250, and 300 words. Also cover Essay On Mouse for classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and up to the 12th class and also for kids, children, and students. You can read more  Essay Writing in 10 lines about sports, events, occasions, festivals, etc… Essay On Mouse is also available in different languages. In this Essay On Mouse, the following features are explained in the given manner.

History And Origin Of The Computer Mouse

The first computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart, a computer scientist, in 1963. The mouse was made out of wood and had two metal wheels that could roll in any direction. Engelbart demonstrated the use of the mouse in a historic 1968 presentation that showcased several revolutionary computing technologies. The mouse quickly gained popularity and was adopted by Xerox PARC in the 1970s, where it was further developed and refined.

Anatomy Of A Mouse

The physical components of a computer mouse include the body, buttons, scroll wheel, and optical sensor. The body is the outer shell of the mouse and contains the buttons and scroll wheel. The buttons are used for left-clicking, right-clicking, and middle-clicking, while the scroll wheel is used for scrolling up and down on web pages or documents. The optical sensor is located at the bottom of the mouse and detects the mouse’s movement.

Types Of Mouse

There are different types of computer mice, including wired vs. wireless mice, optical vs. mechanical mice, and gaming mice vs. regular mice. Wired mice connect to the computer through a USB or PS/2 port, while wireless mice use Bluetooth or a USB receiver to communicate with the computer. Optical mice use an LED or infrared sensor to detect movement, while mechanical mice use a rubber ball and mechanical sensors. Gaming mice have advanced features such as customizable buttons, adjustable DPI, and RGB lighting.

Mouse Usage And Benefits

The mouse is used to navigate user interfaces, select text, drag and drop files, and perform other functions. Basic mouse functions include left-clicking, right-clicking, and scrolling. Advanced mouse features include gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and customizable buttons. Using the mouse efficiently can enhance productivity and reduce strain on the hands and wrists.

Common Mouse Problems And Solutions

Common problems with computer mice include erratic movement, unresponsive buttons, and connectivity issues. These problems can be caused by outdated drivers, interference from other devices, or hardware issues. Troubleshooting tips include updating drivers, moving the mouse receiver closer to the computer, and cleaning the mouse’s optical sensor.

Future Of Mouse Technology

The future of mouse technology is likely to include more advanced features such as touch sensors, haptic feedback, and advanced gesture recognition. There are also emerging technologies such as brain-computer interfaces that could potentially replace the mouse altogether. However, the mouse is likely to remain a key component of computing technology for the foreseeable future.

The computer mouse has come a long way since its invention in the 1960s. It has become an indispensable tool for navigating user interfaces and interacting with computer software. Understanding the anatomy, types, and usage of the mouse can enhance productivity and reduce strain on the hands and wrists. Common mouse problems can be solved through troubleshooting tips, and the future of mouse technology is likely to include more advanced features. As computing technology continues to evolve, the mouse is likely to remain a vital component of human-computer interaction.

Read More: 10 Lines On Monitor

FAQ’s On Mouse Essay

Question 1. What is mouse short notes?

Answer: The computer mouse is an input device used to control the cursor on the screen. It typically has left, right, and middle buttons and a scroll wheel. The mouse can be connected to a computer via a wired or wireless connection. It is an essential tool for navigating user interfaces and interacting with computer software.

Question 2. What is called mouse?

Answer: The mouse is an input device used to control the cursor on a computer screen. It allows users to click, drag, and scroll through various software applications. It can be connected to a computer via a wired or wireless connection. The mouse is a vital tool for navigating user interfaces and interacting with computer software.

Question 3. What is mouse functions?

Answer: The primary functions of a computer mouse include left-clicking, right-clicking, and scrolling. It can also perform other functions such as selecting text, dragging and dropping files, and zooming in and out. Advanced mouse features include gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and customizable buttons. Using the mouse efficiently can enhance productivity and reduce strain on the hands and wrists.

Question 4. Who made the first mouse?

Answer: The first computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart was a computer scientist who developed the mouse in 1963. The first mouse was made of wood and had two metal wheels that could roll in any direction. The mouse quickly gained popularity and became a standard component of modern computing technology.

Question 5. What is the first name of mouse?

Answer: The first computer mouse was originally called an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System”. It was invented by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English at the Stanford Research Institute. The first prototype of the mouse was made out of wood and had two metal wheels. The name “mouse” was later coined due to its resemblance to a small rodent.

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Historic Firsts:   The Mouse 0

Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the early 1960s in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). The first prototype – a one-button mouse in a wooden shell on wheels – was built in 1964 to test the concept. 1a

The first mouse now on exhibit at the Smithsonian! Click here for details .

Based on results of his landmark study on ' Augmenting the Human Intellect ,' Engelbart had received modest funding to evaluate the speed and efficiency of various devices for pointing on a display screen, like the joy stick, including a few his team rigged up and threw into the mix, like the one they called a "mouse." Which pointing device scored the highest? How was it built and tested? What inspired all this anyway? Read on! And don't miss Check it Out below for original footage, photos, timelines, documents, fun facts, and more. 1b

A patent application for the mouse was filed in 1967, and US Patent 3,541,541 was awarded in 1970 under the descriptive title "X-Y position indicator for a display system." 1c

Although many impressive innovations for interacting with computers have followed in the last 50 years since its invention, the mouse remains to this day the most efficient hands on pointing device available for speed and accuracy. 11dc

The First Mouse 2

Since 1951 Doug had envisioned intellectual workers sitting at high-performance interactive display workstations, accessing a vast online information space in which to collaborate on important problems. When pondering the question of pointing devices in 1961, he was in the midst of an in-depth study of how teams and organizations might become much more effective in solving important problems. In 1962 he published his findings in " Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework ," which in 1963 garnered him some modest funding from ARPA to begin to hire a very small research team, and set up a basic lab with computer resources, teletypes, and finally, a display workstation.

By now there were several off-the-shelf solutions for moving a cursor and selecting something on a display screen, but no good data about which would be most efficient to meet Engelbart's "high-performance" requirement. He applied for and was awarded a small grant from NASA to explore that question.

Check It Out 3

Witness the World's Debut - watch Doug introduce the mouse , and watch the mouse in action , footage selected from Doug's newly re-mastered 1968 'Mother of All Demos' - and now using your own mouse or alternative, you can 'test drive' the demo interactively , or watch just the Demo Highlights 3a

Watch Doug tell the story in his Designing Interactions interview with IDEO's Bill Mogridge [ book ], in his 2002 Oral History interview with NY Times' John Markoff for the Computer History Museum, and in his historic talk " The Augmented Knowledge Workshop " presented at the 1986 Conference on the History of the Personal Workstation. 3b

On Exhibit: visit virtual and actual museum exhibits showcasing his innovations at the Smithsonian Museum, the Computer History Museum, and more. Visit On Exhibit and Special Collections by Institution for details. 3c

Watch Doug telling the story of how he invented the mouse in Logitech 's 2004 interview. 3d

Watch "The Computer Mouse" video short on how the mouse changed lives and enabled the personal computing industry to take off and thrive. 3d

Explore the Stanford University MouseSite where you will find images of the first mouse , the US Patent on the Mouse , historic photos from the lab, and much more. 3e

See SRI's Timeline on Innovation: Computer Mouse and Interactive Computing , MIT Press Designing Interactions: Doug Engelbart , Macworld's mouse history timeline , PC Advisor's 40th anniversary timeline , and our History in Pix photo gallery. 3f

Check out the online Exhibit on the Mouse and Keyset at the Computer History Museum , as well as press coverage of their 2001 event " Early Computer Mouse Encounters ". 3g

Logitech celebrates "ONE BILLION MICE SOLD!" making headlines in 2008. See Logitech's press release , blog post with links to press, and their billionth mouse celebration page with links to press kits filled with fun facts and timelines. The event coincided with our 40th anniversary celebration of Doug's landmark demo, titled "Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing". Enjoy the following timeline from Logitech's press kit marking their 2008 celebrations. 3h

The Mouse Wins 4

In 1965 Engelbart's team published the final report of their study evaluating the efficiency of the various screen-selection techniques. They had pitted the mouse against a handful of other devices, some off the shelf, some of their own making (see Mouse Alternatives below). The mouse won hands down, and was thus included as standard equipment in their research moving forward (see Screen-Selection Experiments below for links to key reports and papers detailing these experiments ). In 1967, SRI filed for the patent on the mouse , under the more formal name of "x,y position indicator for a display system," and the patent was awarded in 1970. 4a

Enter, the Keyset 3b

Enter, the Keyset: To further increase efficiency, Engelbart's team thought to offer a companion to the mouse – a device for the left hand to enter commands or text while the right hand was busy pointing and clicking (shown above). After trying out several variations, they settled on a telegraph-style " keyset " with five piano-like keys. This keyset also became standard equipment in the lab (pictured below). Both devices were introduced to the public in Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, now known as the " Mother of All Demos " (see Check It Out below for links to selected video footage of the debut, historic photos, and more). 4b

In Doug's Words: 4c

The mouse we built for the [1968] show was an early prototype that had three buttons. We turned it around so the tail came out the top. We started with it going the other direction, but the cord got tangled when you moved your arm. I first started making notes for the mouse in '61. At the time, the popular device for pointing on the screen was a light pen, which had come out of the radar program during the war. It was the standard way to navigate, but I didn't think it was quite right. Two or three years later, we tested all the pointing gadgets available to see which was the best. Aside from the light pen there was the tracking ball and a slider on a pivot. I also wanted to try this mouse idea, so Bill English went off and built it. We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before. It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I'm surprised the name stuck. We also did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons the mouse should have. We tried as many as five. We settled on three. That's all we could fit. Now the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac. Doug Engelbart in The Click Heard Round The World , by Ken Jordan, WIRED 2004

Mouse Alternatives 5

Engelbart and his team tested a half dozen pointing devices for speed and accuracy. These included the mouse, and a knee apparatus (pictured below, right), both created in-house, along with several off the shelf devices such as DEC's Grafacon (pictured below, center, modified for testing purposes), a joy stick, and a light pen. See Screen-Selection Experiments below for links to more details and photos. They also experimented with a foot pedal device as well as a head mounted device, neither of which made it into the final tests. 5a

A small piece of a large vision 6

In the 1950s, Doug Engelbart set his sights on a lofty goal -- to develop dramatically better ways to support intellectual workers around the globe in the daunting task of finding solutions to larger and larger problems with greater speed and effectiveness than ever before imagined. His goal was to revolutionize the way we work together on such tasks. He saw computers, at the time used primarily for number crunching, as a new medium for advancing the state of the art in collaborative knowledge work. Building on technology available at the time, his research agenda required that his team push the envelope on all fronts: they had to expand the boundaries of display technology and interactive computing and human-computer interface , help launch network computing , and invent hypermedia , groupware , knowledge management , digital libraries, computer supported software engineering , client-server architecture, the mouse, etc. on the technical front, as well as pushing the frontiers in process reengineering and continuous improvement, including inventing entirely new organizational concepts and methodologies on the human front. Engelbart even invented his own innovation strategy for accelerating the rate and scale of innovation in his lab which, by the way, proved very effective. His seminal work garnered many awards , and sparked a revolution that blossomed into the Information Age and the Internet. But as yet we have only scratched the surface of the true potential Engelbart envisioned for dramatically boosting our collective IQ in the service of humankind's greatest challenges. Check out his Call to Action and the Engelbart Academy to learn about his prescient message for the future. 6a

Genesis of the mouse: 7

Doug's Early Vision: From the introduction of his Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework (1962): 7a

Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side; this is his working surface, and is controlled by a computer (his "clerk") with which he can communicate by means of a small keyboard and various other devices. 7a1 He is designing a building. He has already dreamed up several basic layouts and structural forms, and is trying them out on the screen. The surveying data for the layout he is working on now have already been entered, and he has just coaxed the clerk to show him a perspective view of the steep hillside building site with the roadway above, symbolic representations of the various trees that are to remain on the lot, and the service tie points for the different utilities. The view occupies the left two-thirds of the screen. With a pointer he indicates two points of interest, moves his left hand rapidly over the keyboard, and the distance and elevation between the points indicated appear on the right-hand third of the screen. 7a2 Doug Engelbart, 1962 [ Source ]

From As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, 1945 (quoted by Engelbart in Augmenting Human Intellect ): 7b

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. 7b1 "It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk. 7b2 Vannevar Bush, 1945 [ Source ]

Read more... and see how Engelbart was influenced by Vannevar Bush. 7b3

Debunking the Xerox PARC Mouse Myth 8

In the early 1970s, the mouse migrated from Doug's lab at SRI to Xerox PARC (along with some of his team), and later to Apple when Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, and beyond. One of the most common myths about the mouse is the mistaken belief that it was invented at Xerox PARC. Note that the first mouse was built in 1964, the patent for the mouse was filed in 1967 , and demonstrated to an audience of over a thousand in 1968, by which time production models were in operational use throughout Doug's lab. Xerox PARC did not exist until 1970. 8a

"Your article on Xerox noted that its research center Xerox PARC was responsible for the computer mouse. Douglas C. Engelbart and his team at SRI International (which was then known as Stanford Research Institute) invented the mouse and created the foundations for personal computing. The patent for the mouse was filed in 1967, three years before Xerox PARC was established in 1981 ." 8a1

Explore the Web 9a

• Visit Historic Firsts - for more of Doug Engelbart's many groundbreaking firsts; related to the Mouse, see especially Interactive Computing and The Keyset . 9a1
• MouseSite - the definitive website on the Mouse hosted by Stanford University, especially their Photos of the First Mouse page. They also curate video of the 1968 demo and other significant archives from Doug Engelbart's work. 9a2
• See the SRI Timeline on Innovation: Personal Computing + the Mouse , the SRI press release Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing (excellent overview), as well as our event resources page for Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing 9a3
• Visit the online exhibit on The Mouse at the Computer History Museum or visit their museum in Mt. View, CA; check out their Early Computer Mouse Encounters event at the Computer History Museum, Oct 17, 2001 9a4
• See the Mouse Timeline in The computer mouse turns 40 - a great article by Benj Edwards, Macworld, Dec 9, 2008 on the history of the Mouse. 9a5
• Visit Logitech's Billionth Mouse site - see the genesis of the mouse. 9a6
• Planimeter: Planimeters are often used by surveyors, foresters, geologists, geographers, engineers, and architects to measure areas on maps of any kind and scale, as well as plans, blueprints, or any scale drawing or plan. (source: Ben Meadows ). See How Planimeters Are Used for some great visuals (thanks to Dr. Robert Foote at Wabash College), and this photo of geographers using planimeter for the 1940 census (thanks to the National Archives). See also Wikipedia's more complete Planimeter article with links to other resources. 9a7

From Doug's Lab 9b

• Screen-Selection Experiments: Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation , William K. English, Douglas C. Engelbart and Melvyn L. Berman, March 1967. This paper describes an experimental study into the relative merits of different CRT display-selection devices as used within a real-time, computer-display, text-manipulation system in use at Stanford Research Institute. The mouse was tested against other devices and found to be the most accurate and efficient. See also the 1965 Report and the 1966 Quarterly Report detailing their screen-selection experiments. 9b1
• Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework , Douglas C. Engelbart. 1962. See for example how he envisioned an architect might work interactively with a computer in 1962 in the Introduction's summary of Section IV (quoted at right). 9b2
• Doug Engelbart - A Lifetime Pursuit , a short biographical sketch by Christina Engelbart describes the larger context of this early work. 9b3

10 Types of Computer Mouse (With Pictures)

Welcome to a guide and list of the different types of computer mouse. A computer mouse is a gadget that we commonly see these days, but not many people will even think twice about it. A mouse is a mouse, right? What is so interesting about it? You will be surprised.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TYPES OF COMPUTER MOUSE

Let us now walk through the various types of computer mice in this section.

1) WIRELESS MOUSE

Otherwise known as a cordless mouse, these refer to every mouse that does not have a piece of cable sticking out; Instead of using the “traditional” cables, wireless mice use radio frequency (RF) to communicate with computer devices. There are 2 parts to the equation:

As to the “wireless signals” part, please take note that it is not universal – Some wireless mouse uses the common Bluetooth standard, some uses a 2.4 GHz wireless standard, and a few others have their own proprietary wireless USB dongle.

The bad: Requires batteries. Even though wireless mouse uses very little power and should last pretty long, but they still need fresh batteries once in a while… Running out of batteries in the middle of a game or presentation is always a bad situation.

2) WIRED MOUSE

As you might have guessed it, wired mice refer to every mouse that has an attached cable and requires to be plugged into a computer device. For those who are thinking that wired mice are “low tech”, “outdated”, and “inferior” – They are not, and are essentially the same as their wireless counterparts… Less wireless circuits and no batteries are required.

The bad:  You will have to deal with a piece of cable.

3) MECHANICAL MOUSE

The good:  For collection… A mechanical mouse is kind of cool, but sadly, they have gone extinct and are no longer manufactured.

The bad:  Mechanically driven, the wheels and sensors will wear out over time.

4) OPTICAL MOUSE

The bad: Optical mice will not work properly on surfaces that do not reflect light, such as a piece of clear glass or plastic.

5) LASER MOUSE

The laser mouse is also a kind of optical mouse, and the working principles are the same – To sense the movement by reflecting light. But just as the name implies, a laser mouse uses a laser beam instead of an LED. This basically allows the mouse to be used on glass and plastic surfaces due to the different properties of light but suffers from some inaccuracy.

6) GAMING MOUSE

While a typical mouse usually only has 3 buttons, a gaming mouse is characterized by having many buttons and touting itself to be accurate. These extra buttons are often programmable to do various things… Mostly for the purpose of gaming.

The good : Programmable buttons, very useful even for non-gaming purposes. For example, they can be used as forward and backward buttons for web browsing or video playback.

7) TRACKBALL MOUSE

The ball itself is typically made of dense glass or plastic, it is smooth and does not attract dirt as sticky rubber does. Some trackball mouse is also made to be held in one hand and acts more like a remote control than a mouse.

8)  STYLUS  MOUSE

This is a “mutated mouse” that is a cross between a pen and a mouse. Favored by digital artists, the stylus mouse is about the size of a very fat brush, typically used for freehand drawing with computers. Yep, some of the higher-end stylus mice are even sensitive to touch pressure for emulating actual brush strokes on paper.

9)  PRESENTATION  MOUSE

Once upon a time, we have to carry a laser pointer, a mouse, and an extra person for presentations. We often have to shout “next slide” for that someone to click on the mouse. Some smart monkeys thought it will be a good idea to combine a mouse and laser pointer together, and it is.

The good : Laser pointer and mouse, 2-in-1. Some can function as a smart TV remote as well.

10) VERTICAL MOUSE

Yes, this is a mouse that stands upright, and you sort of “grab” it… Probably one of the “weirder” mice on the entire list, but this design has so-called “better ergonomics”.

The bad : Not symmetrical, have to buy specifically for left or right-handed.

USEFUL BITS & LINKS

That’s all for this guide, and here is a small section on some extras and links that may be useful to you.

WHICH IS THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL?

Well, everyone has a different need – Some people just want to do some casual work, some people like to paint, and some are gamers. Every mouse is designed for a different purpose, and there really isn’t “one mouse to rule them all”. So whichever mouse works for you is the best mouse.

LINKS & REFERENCES

Thank you for reading, and we have come to the end of this guide. I hope that this has helped you to better understand the computer mice, and if you have anything to share with this guide, please feel free to comment below. Good luck and happy computing. May the cyber force be with you.

8 thoughts on “10 Types of Computer Mouse (With Pictures)”

Thanks a lots for these good iiformation and highlighted points on computing mouse, I appreciate and God bless you, we will like more and others as well.

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How to use a computer mouse

A computer mouse is a handheld pointing device and input device used with all desktop computers that moves the mouse pointer on the screen. To help with portability, mobile devices, like a laptop, use a touchpad instead of a mouse. Mobile devices, like a smartphone and tablet , use a touch screen for their pointer input. This page is designed to help new computer users become more familiar and efficient with a desktop computer mouse.

• Connecting a mouse to a computer.
• Familiarize yourself with the mouse.
• Holding the mouse.
• Moving the mouse pointer.
• Understanding the mouse cursor (pointer).
• Clicking with the mouse.
• Opening a file or program.
• Selecting an object and highlighting text.
• Drag-and-drop.
• Viewing properties or right-clicking.
• Copy and paste using the mouse.
• Using the mouse wheel.
• Other mouse buttons.
• Other types of mice.

Connecting a mouse to a computer

Before using the mouse, it must be connected correctly to the computer and working. If you have a new computer and need help connecting the mouse, or the mouse is not working, see our steps on connecting and installing a mouse.

• How to connect and install a computer mouse.

Familiarize yourself with the mouse

Today's computer mouse consists of two buttons and a mouse wheel, as shown in the picture below. By default, the left button acts as the left-click and is the default mouse button you use for most actions on the mouse. The right mouse button performs the right-click and gives you a menu or other options explained later.

If you are left-handed, the mouse buttons can be switched. For help switching the mouse button, see: How to change the left and right mouse buttons.

As far as the mouse wheel, it is used to scroll up and down and is also explained in further detail later on this page.

A mouse generates movement using one of two technologies: optical or mechanical. Today, the optical mouse is commonly used, which utilizes either LED (Light-Emitting Diode) or laser to detect movement. The other and older technology is the mechanical mouse , which uses a ball and wheels to determine the movement of the mouse.

Holding the mouse

To hold the mouse, keep your thumb on the side of the mouse, index finger on the left button, and middle finger on the right button. While holding the mouse, relax your hand and make sure your hand is straight with your arm. You should never have your wrist at an angle while using the mouse.

To move the mouse, use your ring finger and pinky to push and move left and your thumb to move right. All up and down movement is done by gently gripping the mouse and pushing or pulling the mouse.

Moving the mouse pointer

Using your right or left hand, pick up the mouse and move it to the center of the mouse pad . Once in position, drag the mouse up, down, left, or right to move the mouse pointer on the screen. If you reach the edge of your mouse pad, pick up the mouse and move it to the opposite side of the mouse pad. Then, continue dragging the mouse in the direction you want the mouse pointer to move.

One way the computer knows the mouse pointer position is with an x-axis and y-axis value. As you move your mouse right, the x-axis value increases, and moving left decreases the x-axis value. Moving down increases the y-axis, and moving up decreases the y-axis. Move your mouse and watch the values in the interactive example below.

Mouse x-axis position. Mouse y-axis position.

Your mouse pad should be big enough not to require you to pick up the mouse. If you have to pick up the mouse frequently, you may want to increase the speed of your mouse.

• How to change the mouse speed in Windows.

If you or someone you know needs another way of practicing with the mouse, play a few games of Solitaire or FreeCell . These games are easy to play and can teach how to move, click, and drag something using the mouse.

Understanding the mouse cursor (pointer)

As you move your mouse, the cursor (pointer) can change as it hovers over different objects. For example, in the animated illustration, the mouse cursor is an arrow . When it hovers over text, the mouse pointer changes to an I-beam cursor . Similarly, when the pointer hovers over a hyperlink in a browser , the mouse pointer changes to a hand icon.

Any program or web page can change how a mouse pointer appears.

Practice hovering with the mouse pointer

In this example text, you can practice hovering your mouse over the text to get each of the different mouse pointers. If your mouse pointer is not over any of the text, your cursor should be an arrow. Moving your pointer over any of this text changes it to an I-beam cursor that lets you select text (explained later). Finally, if you move your mouse cursor over this link , it changes to a hand with the index finger pointing to the link cursor. If you click the link, it skips to the next section about using your mouse to click.

Clicking with the mouse

While you spend most of the time moving a mouse pointer, another important feature of the mouse is clicking the mouse buttons. As mentioned earlier, most clicking is done with the left mouse button. To left-click, you press down on the left mouse button and then let go as if you were pushing a button on a telephone.

Practice left-clicking check boxes

Below are several check boxes you can use to practice left-clicking. Check each of the boxes below.

Check box 1. Check box 2. Check box 3. Check box 4. Check box 5.

Practice left-clicking text

Practice moving the text cursor by clicking anywhere in this box. When you single left click, an I-beam pointer should begin to flash where you clicked to indicate where you would start to type.

Opening a file or program

To open a file or program on a Windows computer, double-click the left mouse button on the icon of the file or program you want to open. To double-click, press your left mouse button twice quickly. For new computer users, double-clicking can be difficult because it requires two quick clicks. If you click too slowly or move your mouse while clicking, it may not work.

If you are having trouble double-clicking your mouse button, you can slow down the mouse clicking speed. For help with slowing down the clicking speed, see: How to increase or decrease the mouse double-click speed.

Double-click practice

Double-click this text.

Double-clicking text practice

Practice double-clicking this text using the steps above. If done successfully, double-clicking selects a word. If you triple-click, the full paragraph is highlighted.

Although double-clicking an icon opens that file or application, some programs, operating systems, menus, and other features may only require a single click.

Selecting an object and highlighting text

When your mouse pointer is on top of an object (e.g., an icon), click the left mouse button once to highlight that object. To select multiple files, as is being done in the animated picture, you can drag a marquee around all objects you want to highlight.

To select text, click the left button at the end of the text you want to select. While pressing the left mouse button, drag the mouse to the left and up to select multiple lines of text.

Practice highlighting text

Below is a text field to practice highlighting text using the keyboard.

Practice highlighting this text using the above steps. Click the mouse cursor at the start of the text, hold down shift, and use your arrow keys.

• How to highlight or select text.
• How to select or highlight multiple files and folders.

Drag-and-drop

The phrase drag-and-drop describes selecting an object or text, moving it ( dragging ), and then placing it ( dropping) in another area. For example, to drag-and-drop an object, such as an icon , you would first move your mouse cursor over it. Then, press and hold the left mouse button, move the object to the desired location, and release the button to set it down.

• Full information and examples of drag-and-drop.

Viewing properties or right-clicking

To see the properties of anything on the computer, move your mouse cursor over the text, icon, folder, or file and press the right mouse button ( right-click ). If the right-click menu does not give you the options you need, select "Properties" from the drop-down menu . If you view the properties of text, you get a menu with options such as cut , copy , and paste .

Copy and paste using the mouse

After learning to right-click using the mouse, you'll find many new options, such as the ability to cut, copy, and paste.

Practice copying and pasting using the mouse

Use the two text fields below to copy the text from the first text box into the second box. Highlight the text using your mouse, as explained in a previous section, and right-click anywhere on the highlighted text. In the context menu , select Copy . When the menu disappears, right-click in the second box where you want to put the text. When the menu appears, select Paste .

• How to copy and paste text to a document or another program.

Using the mouse wheel

The mouse wheel lets you scroll up and down on any page without using the vertical scroll bar . If your mouse has a wheel, you may have already used it to scroll down as you read this page. If you are unfamiliar with this wheel, use it now to scroll up and down on this page.

On most computer mice, the mouse wheel is also a button. You can press it to take an optional action, depending on your program. For example, if you click this Computer Hope link with the mouse wheel, it opens in a new tab .

Other mouse buttons

Many mice are available for the computer today, with many button options. Another popular configuration for a mouse today is to have two thumb buttons on the left side of the mouse. These two buttons allow you to move back and forward on a browser or be programmed to perform any other action on your computer.

Other types of mice

Finally, realize that many sizes and types of mice can be used with a computer. If you have difficulty using your mouse or want to try something, visit a local computer store or online store to see available options. The picture shows a trackball mouse that is easier for some users to use.

• Where to buy computer hardware parts.

Types of computer mice

• Cordless (Wireless)
• IntelliMouse (Wheel mouse)
• Touchpad (Glidepoint)

Related information

• Top 10 computer mouse tips everyone should know.
• Do I need a mouse pad?
• How to use a computer keyboard.
• See the mouse definition for further information and related links.
• Mouse and touchpad help and support.

Design and evaluation of a computer-actuated mouse

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Development of a New Ergonomic Computer Mouse

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• Miguel L. Lourenço 15 ,
• Rui A. Pitarma 15 &
• Denis A. Coelho 16  

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 592))

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• International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics

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Developing a new computer pointing device abiding to the requirements set out in ergonomics literature necessitates joining contributions from several areas including the systematization recommended for product design projects, ergonomic recommendations and principles and guidelines applicable to hand tools as well as anthropometric considerations. The development of new geometries for computer pointing devices constitutes a complex process as these are simultaneously hand tools, enabling the interaction with the computer, and at the same time, meant for use by people from both sexes and practically all ages, as its use today is practically ubiquitous. The paper reports on a study aimed at developing an innovative PC mouse geometry supported by literature review and an adequate design methodology. In particular, reducing forearm pronation was set as a goal for the new design.

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Acknowledgements

The current study was funded in part by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia project UID/EMS/00151/2013 C-MAST

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Miguel L. Lourenço & Rui A. Pitarma

Human Technology Group, Department of Electromechanical Engineering, Centre for Mechanical and Aerospace Science and Technology, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal

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Isabel L. Nunes

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Lourenço, M.L., Pitarma, R.A., Coelho, D.A. (2018). Development of a New Ergonomic Computer Mouse. In: Nunes, I. (eds) Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 592. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_43

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_43

Published : 23 June 2017

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Online ISBN : 978-3-319-60366-7

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Essay on Computer and its Uses for School Students and Children

500+ words essay on computer.

In this essay on computer, we are going to discuss some useful things about computers. The modern-day computer has become an important part of our daily life. Also, their usage has increased much fold during the last decade. Nowadays, they use the computer in every office whether private or government. Mankind is using computers for over many decades now. Also, they are used in many fields like agriculture, designing, machinery making, defense and many more. Above all, they have revolutionized the whole world.

History of Computers

It is very difficult to find the exact origin of computers. But according to some experts computer exists at the time of world war-II. Also, at that time they were used for keeping data. But, it was for only government use and not for public use. Above all, in the beginning, the computer was a very large and heavy machine.

Working of a Computer 

The computer runs on a three-step cycle namely input, process, and output. Also, the computer follows this cycle in every process it was asked to do. In simple words, the process can be explained in this way. The data which we feed into the computer is input, the work CPU do is process and the result which the computer give is output.

Components and Types of Computer

The simple computer basically consists of CPU, monitor, mouse, and keyboard . Also, there are hundreds of other computer parts that can be attached to it. These other parts include a printer, laser pen, scanner , etc.

The computer is categorized into many different types like supercomputers, mainframes, personal computers (desktop), PDAs, laptop, etc. The mobile phone is also a type of computer because it fulfills all the criteria of being a computer.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Uses of Computer in Various Fields

As the usage of computer increased it became a necessity for almost every field to use computers for their operations. Also, they have made working and sorting things easier. Below we are mentioning some of the important fields that use a computer in their daily operation.

Medical Field

They use computers to diagnose diseases, run tests and for finding the cure for deadly diseases . Also, they are able to find a cure for many diseases because of computers.

Whether it’s scientific research, space research or any social research computers help in all of them. Also, due to them, we are able to keep a check on the environment , space, and society. Space research helped us to explore the galaxies. While scientific research has helped us to locate resources and various other useful resources from the earth.

For any country, his defence is most important for the safety and security of its people. Also, computer in this field helps the country’s security agencies to detect a threat which can be harmful in the future. Above all the defense industry use them to keep surveillance on our enemy.

Threats from a Computer

Computers have become a necessity also, they have become a threat too. This is due to hackers who steal your private data and leak them on internet. Also, anyone can access this data. Apart from that, there are other threats like viruses, spams, bug and many other problems.

The computer is a very important machine that has become a useful part of our life. Also, the computers have twin-faces on one side it’s a boon and on the other side, it’s a bane. Its uses completely depend upon you. Apart from that, a day in the future will come when human civilization won’t be able to survive without computers as we depend on them too much. Till now it is a great discovery of mankind that has helped in saving thousands and millions of lives.

Frequently Asked Questions on Computer

Q.1  What is a computer?

A.1 A computer is an electronic device or machine that makes our work easier. Also, they help us in many ways.

Q.2 Mention various fields where computers are used?

A.2  Computers are majorly used in defense, medicine, and for research purposes.

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