If your cat is hungry, don’t let your mouse run away.

In the 50s one of  the biggest problems in the computer science was the lack of an easy interaction between the users and computers. In the most of the cases the only interaction with the home computer screen  was by the keyboard.

Douglas Engelbart

Since the age of the textual OS (operating systems) ended and the age of the window OS began, the users needed a better user experience and an easy way to manage the windows on the screen.  In 1963 Douglas Engelbart, a researcher and electronics engineer of  the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project ), he applied for patenting an electronic device based on a wood cube and two perpendicular iron wheels. He got to patent the device together Bill English   in 1970 and he named it  MOUSE.

Douglas Engelbart’s MOUSE

The first example of  MOUSE,  the TRACKBALL  (a sphere which measured the movements and sent them to a pointer), was a project of the Canadian Navy, but the device had never been patented because the military confidentiality. The MOUSE with a TRACKBALL was instead a project of the German company Telefunken but Engelbart had already applied for patenting his device before the Telefunken’s product was exhibited to the public.  The first computer which used the MOUSE was the Xerox Alto, but the first man which foresaw the MOUSE’s potentiality in an OS with User Interface was Steve Jobs with the Apple Lisa and Macintosh. In the last years of 80s Engelbart founded  the Doug Engelbart institute as an office of the SRI international in the University of Stanford where he studied.  In 2000s the USA president  Bill Clinton gave him the National Medal of Technology, the most important acknowledgement in the USA.