The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Career

And it's a curious feeling to stumble upon memories I haven't touched in years -- I used to love idly disassembling computer mice, cleaning out fuzz and gunk from the little rollers and the ball, and putting them back together. It was one of things I had to consciously stop myself from doing if I was sitting at someone else's desk.

Optical mice have been around so long now, I had completely forgotten how they used to work, and that odd little pleasure of maintaining a simple mechanical device.

Edit: this confuses me, though: The basic approach — pairing a freely-rolling ball with a optoelectronic system — was used by generations of mice that followed, changing only incrementally until optical mice did away with trackballs altogether.

Is that right? The mice I was always taking apart normally detected the motion of the trackball with two little white rollers, for Y and X motion. That's neither of these systems.

This was certainly not a new insight – it was clearly explained in 1968 in the “Mother of all Demos” by Douglas Engelbart, where the original computer mouse was first introduced. This insight is what enabled the mouse to even exist – previous similar devices were known as digitizer boards and were strictly tied to their pads – they were one integrated unit. The very idea of a mouse device by itself is absolutely dependent on this insight that precise accuracy is not necessary.

Would that not have been patented? Did Apple licence it from Atari? If they did, they were lucky that Atari allowed it – Atari might simply have denied Apple a license.

EDIT: Replace “Atari” with “whoever owned the patent”.