Mouse
From Saferpedia
The computer mouse is a pointing device that is held in one hand and works by bi-dimensional detection on the surface it's sitting on. The name comes from the mouse, the animal, and is designed specially to fit naturally in one hand. Its movement on the contact surface is transformed in the movement of the pointing element on the computer monitor called a cursor.
The first integrated mouse, sold as part of a computer destined for surfing on the personal computer came in package with the informational system Xerox 8010 in 1981. Although the mouse was relatively unknown until Apple Macintosh.
Today the mouse is widely used on PCs and are available on a large scale of sizes and shapes.
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Name
The first known publish of the term "mouse" as a pointing device is from 1965.
The English Compact Dictionary Oxford (third edition) and American Heritage Dictionary of English language (fourth edition) support both names "computer mice" and "computer mouses" as correct forms of plural of the form "computer mouse".
First pointing devices
The trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Longstaff Fred and Taylor Kenyon while working at the Canadian Marine's project DATAR in 1952.
Independently from that, Douglas Engelbart from the Standford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963 with the help of his colleague Bill English. Engelbart never got the copyright for his invention because it's brevet expired before to become widely used for personal computers.
Engelbart and other continued the experiments on inventing other devices to create the perfect pointing device.
The first mouse was a massive device and uses two perpendicular gears: the using of one of them as transposed in movement on an axis. Engelbart received the US3541541 brevet in November 1970 for a position indicator X-Y for a display device.
Variants
Mechanic mouse
The mouse ball replaced the external gears of the first mouse with one ball that could rotate in any direction. This was commercialized as part of the Xerox Alto computer. This kind of mouse looked like a reverse trackball and became the most predominant mouse form used on personal computers since the 80s.
The mouse ball has two independent gears disposed separately on a 90 degrees angle. One gear detects the back - forward movement and the other one the left - right movement. In the opposite part there is a third wheel position at a 45 degrees angle, pushed by a spring to push the ball to the two gears.
The ball is spherical built from steel and padded with a rubber surface in order to have adherence to the two gears.
The ball and the gears were manufactured for Xerox by Jack Hawley.
Optical mouse
Unlike the mechanic mouse that uses movement of some of its parts, an optical mouse uses a light emitting diode and photodiodes to detect the movement in report with the contact surface.
Inactive and gyroscopic mouse
Also called the "air mice" because it doesn't require a work surface, the inactive mouse uses an accelerometer to detect rotation movements for any axis. Most frequent models (produced by Logitech and Gyration) works using 2 degrees of rotation freedom and are insensitive to spatial translation. User only have to execute small rotations of the wrist of the hand to move the cursor.
3D mouse
Known as "bath" this device works with ultra sounds and offers at least three degrees of freedom. Probably the most known example would be the SpaceMouse 3Dconnexion from Logitech from the early 90s.
At the late 90s Kantek introduced the 3D RingMouse. It is a wireless mouse on ring around a finger allowing the thumb to access the three buttons.
Also a recent consumer of 3D pointing devices is Wii Remote.
Connectivity and communication protocols
to be able to communicate a mouse with wire uses and electric cable with a connector at one end like RS-232C, PS/2 connector, ADP or USB. Unlike this wireless mouse send data trough infrared radiations or radio.
