OK so today may have been the day that the mouse was first shown off publicly, forty years ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that Douglas Engelbart had a working version of the device four years before the Stanford demonstration.
Here’s the version he had in 1964, which looks remarkably similar to the model ‘born’ four years later, and not that much worse than the rubbish Dell one I have to use at work.
(Image via ITKnowledgeExchange)
So while we can’t really say ‘happy birthday’ to the mouse today… I suppose we can at least wish it a very happy unbirthday.
Oh, and for those still not convinced by the veracity of this claim (it has caused some uncertainty in the office), I quote as my sources, the infallible Wikipedia and the 2008 calendar for the Autonomous University of Barcelona which happened to include the above picture with the caption “The first mouse, 1964” as its November picture. Case closed.
