Doug Englebart - mouse!

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Thu Nov 17 12:26:06 CST 2016


On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, jos wrote:
> Of course Telefunken had already a mouse, a.k.a. Rollkugel, in 1968.

and MARKETED it!

"Invention" and "FIRST" are always on shaky ground in any real historical 
research.
Telefunken didn't consider it important enough to patent.  Most REAL 
inventors consider their projects to be faar too "obvious" to patent them.


Wikipedia does mention the rollkugel!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse

Picture of Engelbart's hand holding mouse, does however still call his 
"first".

(I just made a correction to the Wikipedia article, where it listed the 
original Macintosh as 1994!)

There are NUMEROUS changes needed to the article, but I figured that THAT 
one was at least not disputable.

"Microsoft's mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginning Microsoft hardware."
If "Microsoft hardware" is intended to be a proper noun for NAME of a 
division, then "hardware" should be capitalized.  Otherwise, what happened 
to history of the Microsoft Z80 Softcard, which was an amazingly 
successful venture into hardware, and is even rumored to be WHY 
certain folk at IBM mistakenly thought that Microsoft was the source for 
CP/M.  (no citations available)

"However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the appearance of 
the Macintosh 128K (which included an updated version of the Lisa Mouse) 
in 1994,[24] and of the Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST in 1985."
is arguably correct (other than the Mac date listed!)  Mice were around, 
but the general public (Wikipedia AUTHORS?) didn't notice them until Mac.


Who has some time to go clean up Wikipedia?



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