30-07-2009, 05:37 PM
Every day of our computing life, we reach out for our mouse whenever we want to move our cursor or activate something. Our mouse senses our motion and our clicks and sends them to the computer so that it can respond appropriately. It is amazing how simple and effective a mouse is, and it is also amazing how long it took Mice to become a part of everyday life. Given that people naturally point at things †usually before they speak †it is surprising that it took so long for a good pointing device to develop. Although originally conceived in the 1960s, it took quite some time for mice to become mainstream. In the beginning there was no need to point because computers used crude interfaces like teletype machines or punch cards for data entry. The early text terminals did nothing more than emulate a teletype (using the screen to replace paper), so it was many years (well into the 1960s and early 1970s) before arrow keys were found on most terminals. Full screen editors were the first things to take real advantage of the cursor keys, and they offered humans the first crude way to point.
http://pptpdf.net/subcategory.php?categ=...-MOUSE.pdf
