Computer mouse is a hardware input device that was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963 while working at Xerox PARC, who at the time was working at the Stanford Research Institute, which was a think tank sponsored by Stanford University. The picture is of a Microsoft IntelliMouse and is an example of what a computer mouse may look like.
The mouse allows an individual to control a pointer in a graphical user interface (GUI) and manipulate on-screen objects such as icons, files, and folders. By using a mouse the user doesn’t have to memorize commands, like those used in a text-based command line environment such as MS-DOS. For example, in MS-DOS a user would have to know the cd command and dir command to navigate to a folder and view the files. However, in Windows the user only has to double-click on the folder to view all the files.
The Mouse was originally referred to as an X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. Xerox later applied the mouse to its revolutionary Alto computer system in 1973. However, because of Alto’s unfortunate success, it was first widely used in the Apple Lisa computer. Today, a pointing device is found on virtually every computer.
