Talk:Computer mouse/Archive 2

who invented the original mouse?
a user has changed the entry to Algar Epps of University of East Anglia, from Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute... So... who is is it really?CoolFox 03:42, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

That appears to be vandalism. The original inventor is definitely Engelbart; he conceived of the concept and directed its design (although under his direction, a draftsman drew the first diagram and technicians actually built the thing). There are dozens of boxes of Engelbart's personal papers at Stanford's Special Collections archives that substantiate his role. Plus there's the patent. --Coolcaesar 03:46, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks... that clears things up quite a bit. CoolFox 04:13, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Single/double-clicking files

 * Advocates of multiple-button mice point out that the lack of additional mouse buttons often leads to clumsy workarounds in interfaces where more than one action may be useful for a given object. For example, in the Macintosh Finder, the user must single-click to select a file, and double-click in order to open that file.

Uh... isn't that what you do in Windows? Single-click to select, double-click to open? - furrykef (Talk at me) 13:27, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes. They got that from the Macintosh. The point made above is that doubleclick is a "clumsy workaround". The example probably isn't the best – a better one would be to point out that the Macintosh UI included contextual menus ("right click menus) brought up by ctrl+clicking. &mdash; David Remahl 13:58, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I've changed the example, as suggested. Fieari 18:43, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

Less experienced users

 * Anyone who regularly assists non-expert users on Windows systems will quickly learn that a very large number of users have never used any button other than the left-most button; a common result of demonstrating the use of right-clicking to make a menu pop up is the exclamation, "I didn't know you could do that!" This suggests that much of the value from multiple buttons would only be available to the average users if their training dramatically increased its emphasis on the power of the right button. Nor are many left-handed users aware that most platforms allow swapping right and left buttons.

Is this paragraph really nessesary? It also seems horribly unsourced. If its true that "Anyone who regularly assists..." knows these things, can't we get a specific quote somewhere? "This suggests..." can we get another quote here too? In fact, the whole paragraph seems somewhat POV in favor of single mouse buttons, which emphasizes the need for quoted sources. I'm considering removing the paragraph unless its cleaned up. I'll give it a little time though. Fieari 18:43, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

Engelbart and number of buttons
In case somebody wonders where I got the idea that Engelbart would have added more buttons if he had had room for the switch mechanisms, it's from a video interview with him that I saw some time ago. Sorry I don't have a URL for that, but it should be googleable. PeteVerdon 19:17, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Development of the ball mouse
I'm looking for a source which can give us more detail about exactly who at Xerox PARC came up with the ball mouse (i.e. the large ball in the base, which is read to pick up motion). I have looked, and looked, but alas can come up with very little!

Neither Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, nor Smith/Alexander, ''Fumbling the Future, the standard PARC histories have much at all about the mouse. I also looked through the fairly extensive original Alto documentation I have, but 'of course' it says nothing about the development of the mouse. Neither do the relevant articles in Goldberg's History of Personal Workstations, the standard academic work on the topic.

(As one history I saw laments, "Even the best general histories of computing make only passing mention to the mouse and its development ... the MouseSite web site .. unintentionally collapses the distance between the Engelbart mouse and its commercial descendants". This is sad, because it involved a lot of clever work to turn the Engelbart device into today's cheap and reliable mouse.)

Anyway, as best I can tell, the canonical story is that Bill English did it, but I'm not sure that's correct. A wonderful paper, mostly about the later development of the mouse, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Of Mice and Zen: Product Design and Invisible Innovation, says:


 * "Xerox engineers (including Engelbart's former collaborator English) redesigned the ARC mouse substantially for the Alto, making it smaller and lower-profile .. Just as important were their mechanical changes: they replaced the discs with a ball bearing whose motion was read by a pair of rollers connected to electrical brushes"

but it says nothing about who the "Xerox engineers" were, or gives a source. A person named Jack Hawley seems to have worked on that mouse as a contract employee:


 * Jack Hawley had worked on the Xerox mouse as a consultant during 1971 .. when Xerox PARC was developing its Alto .. mouse.

which is confirmed by the fact that the Alto I mouse's motherboard has "HAWLEY-XEROX MOUSE" on it; and there are a couple of patents (U.S. Pat. No. 3,835,464 to Rider and U.S. Pat. No. 3,892,963 to Hawley et al., both assigned to Xerox Corporation) which may be relevant. Another patent says:


 * "The design of this mouse led to the use of ball bearings as wheels and optical shaft encoders to generate a two bit quadrature signalling code, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,892,963. The motion of a wheel caused a two bit output for a coordinate direction to form square waves in quadrature, with phase and frequency determined the direction and speed of travel. Each bit transition represented motion of one resolvable step .. Further development led to the employment of a ball or sphere instead of two wheels for more uniform tracking (U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,835,464 and 3,987,685). Internally, the sphere itself was a trackball with shafts turning against the ball and with commutation as shaft encoders or optical disc encoders, the latter being disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,304,434."

which is a bit hard to interpret (the Alto mouse used several different balls; the large one to contact the surface, and then a series of smaller ones around it) without actually reading the patents in question.

Anyway, does anyone have an info on this? I have sent email to Alex, and we'll see if he has any info. Noel (talk) 02:56, 10 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I attended this talk at PARC in 2001, but apparently it was before the CHM started videotaping these (or maybe they just didn't make it avaialable for some reason--must ask...): http://computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1090020693 But since the part I recall is mostly just my own Q&A bit, I can't fill in the blanks very well, except on the optical mouse. Dicklyon 20:40, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

More on Ball Mouse
I always thought Chuck Thacker had invented the ball mouse. I worked for him at PARC, but that was after the Alto was in "production". I did look through the patents cited.

The first patent (3,304,434), by Koster is how you get X and Y off of a ball motion with shaft encoders and pulse output. It is not a Xerox patent. I believe this was used in trackballs, which predate mice.

The Hawley Patent (which Thacker is a co-inventor of), 3,892,963 is not a ball mouse. It's an angled wheel, and there are two of them. The drawings on this patent show the 3 horizontal button Alto design. The transducers are optical encoders with pulse output.

The Rider Patent,3,835,464 shows a ball, but uses potentiometer's to get readings off of the ball, as did early Englebart mice. Interestingly, the drawings don't look like the Alto mouse, but the text takes about 3 buttons.

Finally, 3,987,685 is by William Opocensky, which puts the ball of Rider with the shaft encoders of the Koster patent together to make the mouse that was used on the "production" Alto. Opocensky is in Los Angeles, which was where the Alto was actually manufactured (actually El Segundo). When PARC decided that they wanted a whole bunch of Alto's there was a small redesign for manufacturability that involved the Electronics Division in El Segundo. Probably Opocensky was given the task of making the production mouse.

So, it looks from the patent discussions that it was Rider that thought of using the ball, but the ball mouse as we know it now was Opencensky's work. In my experience at PARC, the name on the patent represented the folks who did most of the work, but lots of brainpower was freely given to them. So, English could have contributed ideas to Rider, as could have Thacker, Lampson, or anyone else there, but it looks to me like it was Rider that sat down in the lab and made one work. User:brosen 15:00, 05 January 2006 (UTC)

Apple and today's mouse
That same paper I mentioned above, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Of Mice and Zen: Product Design and Invisible Innovation makes a really valuable point: that the Xerox mouse and the mouses we're all using today look similar on the outside, but are basically completely different inside.

Today's mice are both far cheaper, and far more reliable, than their Xerox predecessors, and it was the Apple-initiated design effort that produced the Mac/Lisa mouse which wrought that change. There's also a really cool trove of original material online at Stanford which documents the Apple mouse effort.

There is a contrary view:


 * Two Swiss scientists, Jean-Daniel Nicoud and Andre Guignard (the former a professor and the latter an engineer and precision watchmaker), are responsible for refining the PARC design into its modern form. Their work, sponsored by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, would lead directly to the formation of contemporary mouse manufacturer Logitech.

but the case for the Apple mouse, as documented at the Stanford site, is pretty impressive.

Anyway, the point of this note was that our article doesn't bring out Apple's important role in the development of the modern mouse. I'm not one of the 'principal' editors here, so I'll leave adding this to someone else; I'll simply add a couple of external links. Noel (talk) 02:58, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Doom supports mouse
The id Software's game Doom supports mouse in reality. The only drawback is that sensitivity that you could enter in options is too small, but you could change it manually in the .cfg file.

Why a mouse is called a mouse
"It is called a mouse primarily because the cord on early models resembled the rodent's tail, and also because the motion of the pointer on the screen can be mouse-like."

Is the second explanation really valid? I've certainly never heard of it before.

StealthFox 19:09, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Additional buttons question
In the section 1.2.1 on Additional Buttons, it seems like any of the buttons may be customized or made into macros. Can someone cite the mouse that allows this?

Bryanlharris 12:50, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Microsoft IntelliMouse
There needs to be more mention of the significance of the Microsoft IntelliMouse. While it may not have been the original invention of the "wheel mouse", it was obviously the significant product that brought the idea to the market with mass appeal. IIRC, the Office 97 release was the big debut of Scroll technology, as all the Office 97 applications had native Wheel scrolling support.

As a post note, there is no IntelliMouse article in Wikipedia either, strangely. J. Straub 21:05, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I think Microsoft IntelliMouse can be credited as the first commercial mouse with a Scrolling Wheel. Microsoft IntelliMouse was introduced in 1996 and became a commercial success in 1997 when Office 97 applications supported scrolling. --Ossiman 08:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

The first commercial mouse with a scrolling wheel was the Mouse Systems ProAgio, which was for sale at least in 1995. is a picture of one. I'll edit the main article to reflect this. Polpo 18:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I was working as a technical editor of a computer magazine and still remember when Mouse System's ProAgio came to the market. And according to my memory, it appeared definedly after MS Intellimouse and it was marginally significant because it was the first "clone" scroll wheel mouse.

Perhaps Intellimouse was originally published before 1996? Earliest mention of IntelliMouse from news is 13th February 1995. Can anyone else confirm what were the actual release dates of Intellimouse and ProAgio? Ossiman 23:47, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Seems that the original scroll wheel inventor is not clear. I found one Microsoft hate-site claiming that Net-Pointe Mouse from PC Concepts, Kensington and Genius Mouse Easyscroll came out before Intellimouse. Hate site is of course a questionable source, but it raises a reasonable doubt.

However I think we can all agree that it was MS Intellimouse (and Office 97 with IE) that made scroll wheel widely known and pratically a basic mouse feature. Ossiman 00:27, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Optical v. Mechanical
I was reading this section and was wondering if anyone else found the following to be a contradiction: ''Also, maintenance of a broken mechanical mouse is much simpler, usually just simple cleaning. However, optical mice do not normally require any maintenance other than removing lint that might collect under the light emitter.'' It says that maintenance on the mechanical is easier then promptly says that maintenance on an optical mouse is usually only "removing lint". This would technically be an easier operation since cleaning your standard "ball" mouse requires removing the ball. -Thebdj 19:57, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

"Optical models will outperform mechanical mice on uneven, slick, squishy, sticky or loose surfaces, and generally in mobile situations lacking mouse pads." - there are not nearly enough descriptive words in this sentance. I recommend adding "rough", "fluffy", "moist" and "decomposing" at the very least. certainly it is not a professional sounding article if it doesn't have all these words.

Laser Mice
This might be sub-grouping things too much, but shouldn't Laser Mice be included as a sub underneath Optical Mice or at the least a mention at the end of the section on optical mice. There are not many difference between the two and technically a laser mouse is still an optical mouse it just so happens it has a laser LED instead of the traditional LED that was used in previous optical mice. -Thebdj 16:07, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Communication protocols and adapters
I suggest to at least mention the other protocols (serial, USB, more?) besides the ones described (PS/2 and Apple) (better also describe the protocol), plus to explain that the different protocols are the reason simple cable adapters work only if the mouse supports both protocols in its hardware.

Let me know if there are any objections or other considerations.

BTW, if there are volunteers that have the knowledge at hand, please go ahead (I could do it only after some additional fact researching).

Gandalf44 07:50, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

PS/2 protocols for the keyboard and mouse, the same site has USB protocols for the keyboard and mouse. Finally, here is some info on Serial and PS/2. Combined the three pages should give enough info. I wouldn't beat around serial too long though since it is pretty much dead (and not just for mice). Of course, PS/2 is slowly dying as they try to force more and more people over towards USB. -Thebdj 16:00, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

The original Mac mouse circa 1985 used a simple direct parallel protocol on a DB-9 connector, pre-ADB, IIRC. It should at least be mentioned here, and explained in detail somewhere. The detailed explanation would help people understand the whole two-physical-axis concept, and encoding of movement. *** Whether or not serial mice are dead, they should be clearly documented in an encyclopedia -- forever. *** There should be a mention that USB mice can sometimes be connected PS/2 with a simple converter, sometimes not -- and an explanation or link explaining exactly why. 69.87.200.23 11:47, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Single sensor per wheel (opto-mechanical) direction detection
I've yet to find any information as to how direction is detected on such a mouse (e.g. MS Serial mouse 2.0) I have read about the 2 sensors per wheel mice and how they determine direction, but this mouse I have opened up does not show any hints as to how it detects direction. I think an update with such info would be great. (edit 2/9/2006) I figured out that some mice have 2 sensors in the same package one above the other with a single IR LED. I just hadn't seen the 3rd lead.
 * I agree. The article doesn't explain right now how mechanical mice can detect if a movement goes up or down (or left or right). --Abdull 10:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

FYI - the "single sensor" you're seeing in your mouse has two detector cells, usually mounted vertically. The single LED shines through the slots in the wheels, the difference in the vertical position of the two cells means the edge of the slot's shadow passes over each cell out of phase. You design the geometry of the slotted wheels so the resulting signals are 90 deg out of phase to improve the s/n of the system.

The direction of movement is determined by which of the two signals changes state first.

This is called quadrature -- a key concept to explain in any article about detecting/encoding axial motion. -69.87.203.252 13:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Spam from Razer USA Ltd
There were at least 4 links to this company, all sounding like text from a product catalog. Smells like spam to me.

"Mouse speed"
I think describing counts per inch/whatever real-world distance as speed is misleading. Precision would be a better term, because a mouse with more CPI works on a finer grid. By scaling the reported movement it's possible to match the so-called speed of another mouse, but on a grid with differently-spaced points. Also, "cursor acceleration can be used to make the cursor accelerate when the mouse is moving at a constant speed" is incorrect. What happens in reality is that pointer movement becomes disproportionally faster as the mouse is sped up, and it often includes a slowdown at low speeds to assist novices in what I call pixelwork. This whole precision/speed/acceleration subject, while it is actually quite simple, seems to be poorly understood, and we should not add to the chaos. --62.194.128.65 (dynamic) 13:00, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

It's been a while and nothing has happened. Would a banner help? I can't seem to get the courage to do the work myself. It's also hard to find good references on this subject. --62.194.128.65 (apparently not that dynamic) 21:55, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

The actual term used in the industry is resolution. You are correct, the main effect is how precisely the cursor tracks your motion over very small motions. Another place you can see the effect is by looking at how smoothly you can draw a curve in a painting program. "Fast" mice will typically send large reports, resulting in a larger distance between points on the curve - the paint program will then draw straight line segments between the points. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.81.92.160 (talk • contribs) 06:27, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Resolution does seem like a better term to me. I didn't begin to notice the straight line segments after switching from 400 to 1600 CPI. I'd noticed them before that, and I can only make them longer (higher max pointer speed) and more divergent (higher max pointer acceleration - real acceleration, not the annoying transfer function) now. Anyway, I'm currently locked in a text browser, and I'd rather make this system more useful than edit Wikipedia. --62.194.128.65 18:54, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Alterate word for rodent---Sonjaaa 07:49, 6 August 2006 (UTC)haters?
Weird question, but: Is there a suitable synonym or term I could use instead of "mouse", because I find mice (the animal) very unpleasant, and I don't like the idea of having my hand on one and moving it around. I'd like to use a different word to not have to think of the rodent.--Sonjaaa 04:38, 3 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Weird question, indeed. So make up a name and use it.  There are trackpads and trackballs, so how about a trackrodent, trackmammal, or trackblob?  Dicklyon 22:58, 3 August 2006 (UTC)


 * maybe simply pointing device, "pointer" or "tracker"??--Sonjaaa 07:49, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Security of wireless mice
We all know the risks of using wireless keyboards (if you don't, find out now!). There is also a smaller risk in using wireless mice. What I don't know is the comparable risk of conventional mice over trackballs. Does anyone know if wireless trackballs are safer? 86.7.209.101 11:51, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

There is no reason they would be. It's the use of the input that matters, not how it is input, at least as long as things don't get obscure. --62.194.128.65 21:55, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Inertial mouse - error?
Is the very short paragraph that is the section titled "Inertial mice", it says that inertial mice operate using gyroscopes. This is impossible, unless the inertial mouse is more of a joystick held like a mouse, since a gyroscope can only sense rotation about an axis, not linear movement. To detect linear movement inertially, accelerometers are necessary. 71.242.69.154 07:39, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

For marketing purposes, some of these mice have been mis-labelled as "gyro" mice. If real gyros are being generally replaced by various solid-state accelerometer sensors, there could even be said to be some basis for such mis-representation.-69.87.203.252 13:49, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Mouse as verb?
I've heard instructor say "mouse over to the browser window." Should some mention of mouse as verb be mentioned in this entry? --Navstar 23:05, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

The timeline of the mouse
I just had a longer phone call with Rainer Mallebrein, the inventor of the mouse.

He confirmed that the basic ideas have been ready long before the "Rollkugelmaus" has been created. The basic ideas are from the German "Flugsicherung" and Telefunken.

He applied for a patent for the Rollkugelmaus" in 1965 but this was rejected by the German patent office.

The final system has been made in spring 1968 with thermo plastics inject molding already - long before the brochure that appeared in october 1968.

Maybe we should reword the current history text. This should also mention that the Engelbart Mouse could not be drawn in a slanting direction because of the two metal wheels while the Mallebrein Mouse had no problems with that kind of use. The university of Stuttgart is currently building a 3-D replique of the Mallebrein Mouse so people are able to get the experience from 1968 today. Schily (talk) 15:22, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
 * But was that published somewhere else first? Under WP:NOR, Wikipedia is never a first publisher of original research. That policy is nonnegotiable. If you believe that Mallebrein's work actually anticipated Engelbart (unlikely), you need to persuade a newspaper, journal, or magazine to publish that assertion first. I know WP:NOR can be very annoying when the published record is incomplete.  But Wikipedia never leads---it always follows the established published record.
 * In contrast, there are dozens of books and hundreds of articles firmly establishing that Engelbart was the inventor of the mouse in the basic sense of conceiving of a handheld X-Y transducer for computer input where the transducer generates the X-Y coordinate data by rolling across a surface, as opposed to a trackball which rotates in place. It's also fairly clear (as the article already mentions) that the term "mouse" was already being used with that meaning by Bill English (who was part of Engelbart's research group) as early as 1965. Finally, Engelbart did far more to publicize the idea of the mouse through his 1968 demo and published articles, as well as indirectly through the flight of many of the SRI ARC researchers to Xerox PARC. --Coolcaesar (talk) 18:35, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
 * It may be possible to find the attempt to apply for a patent that predates the patent from Engelbart, as the patent office should have a record of the reject.


 * The fact that the Telefunken Mouse existed with a thermo plastics inject molding case and could be purchased before the Engelbart mouse has been demonstrated is a known fact already.


 * More important seems to be that the Telefunken mouse could be driven in any direction while the Engelbart mouse has wheels that block any movement that is not aligned with the orientation of one of the wheels. Schily (talk) 18:31, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Please review Wikipedia's core policies as discussed above. Wikipedia policy is to discuss facts in a neutral fashion that can be cited only to verifiable reliable sources. Editors who do not conform their edits to Wikipedia policies tend to not remain editors for very long.
 * Also, under WP:NOT, specifically Wikipedia is not a soapbox, the burden rests with the editor who wishes to add an unusual or minority position to find a reliable source that has already served as the first publisher of that position. The sources added to the article to date do not appear to satisfy Wikipedia policy and I will have to remove the entire mention of the Telefunken mouse soon unless better sources are provided. It is your problem to go find a published patent application which shows that Telefunken attempted to seek a patent before Engelbart's group filed in 1967, or a published article establishing that Telefunken actually conceived of a similar invention and reduced it to practice before Engelbart's group at SRI ARC.
 * I strongly doubt that such documents exist, since every historian, journalist, and sociologist who has examined this issue in print for over fifty years has concluded that Engelbart was first to invent in every respect: first to conceive, first to implement, and first to file. I just added a citation to the article to the Bardini book which mentions that Bill English came to work for Engelbart in 1964, and the first mention of term mouse as referring to a pointing device is in a report authored by English in July 1965.
 * Finally, your last sentence implies that you do not understand the claims in Engelbart's patent or the device it describes. Engelbart demonstrated that the wheel mouse can take the full range of coordinate delta inputs at the Mother of All Demos, and excepts from that videorecording can be found all over the Web including on YouTube. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:55, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Please write only verifiable facts. It is obvious that you either did not check the facts or that you intentionally try to write wrong claims about what journalists believe. Since at least 2009, a majority of journalists believe that the mouse basics have been invented by Rainer Mallebrein and this has been confirmed by various scientists. See e.g. https://www.visus.uni-stuttgart.de/presse-und-medien/news/detailansicht/article/50-jahre-computer-mit-der-maus.html where the origins from the air traffic control have been explained and where scientists and Rainer Mallebrein explained how the move from the air traffic control offices to the office of scientists happened by turning the device in order to prevent the need to use a saw on the table. It is a documented fact that this happened in summer 1968, which is before December 9 1968. From a talk with Mr. Mallebrein, I know that the mouse case made with thermo plastics inject molding exists since aprox. May 1968, but this is documented since October 2 1968. Schily (talk) 11:01, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
 * No serious journalist believes that Telefunken created the mouse, even the article you linked says Engelbart is the creator of the mouse. While the German engineers may have created it first, there is no proof since no patent was filed. A catalog advertisement from October 1968, which is all that exists to verify it was invented, can never count as proof something existed.--Frmorrison (talk) 15:34, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
 * So you believe the right way to "win" disputes about who did things first is to install a weak patent office like the one in the US? Rainer Mallebrein filed his patent a year before Engelbart filed his patent, but the German patent office rejected the attempt with the claim that the level of creation was too low. Schily (talk) 16:39, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Concur with Frmorrison's analysis. I note that Schily has not provided any links or citations to a single published article in a newspaper or journal to support his position.   Furthermore, Schily clearly does not understand what Engelbart is famous for. It is undisputed that Engelbart never invented the ball mouse or optical mouse. Engelbart never sought to take credit for those inventions. What he did invent, and what he did obtain a patent for, is the basic idea of the mouse---a handheld X-Y transducer that is used as a handheld pointing device by moving it across a surface, as distinguished from the earlier technologies of the trackball, which generates X-Y data by spinning in place, and the digital tablet and stylus (where one draws with the stylus on a tablet surface which causes a line to appear on a nearby screen). It is clear from Bill English's July 1965 report that the mouse had already been conceived of and was operational by that point in time. I just discovered the Internet Archive has already scanned in that old report and I am adding a citation and link to the article. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:11, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

The "wheel mouse" could work at arbitrary angles, but not as smoothly a ball mouse, typically. The Rollkugel was probably the first invention of the ball mouse; see the internal pix at oldmouse.com. If the ball mouse invention is not in the timeline, it should be, I think. It's quite possible that it was conceived and executed concurrently with Engelbart's, but without supporting documentation, it's hard to know for sure, and not much that WP should say about it. Dicklyon (talk) 00:40, 3 January 2017 (UTC) Looks like that's all pretty well covered in the article already. Dicklyon (talk) 01:20, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The article does not claim that the Engelbart mouse could operate at arbitrary angles, please verify this claim. Schily (talk) 11:05, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Go watch the Mother Of All Demos on YouTube and read the Engelbart patent. It's obvious from the 1968 footage that Engelbart is freely making a variety of X-Y motions with the wheel mouse to drive the pointer on the screen (which his research group called "the bug" at the time). As Dicklyon points out, the wheel mouse was not as smooth as the later ball or optical mice, but it sufficiently implemented the basic concept of a X-Y transducer. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:52, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Please send a video URL and related time pointers to verify your claims. Note that the Engelbart wheelmouse looks like it uses potentiometers that limit the maximum rotational angle to 270 degrees. This is another problem with this construction. The Mallebrein mouse on the other side uses rotational position transducers with no rotational limit. The only problem in the beginning was that a very fast movement that resulted in a 370 degree rotation in the transducer could not be distinct from a -10 degree movement. This was soon fixed by better software. Schily (talk) 16:49, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
 * It took me only 45 seconds to locate an excerpt on YouTube. The manipulation of the mouse and how its movements are precisely mirrored by the movement of the pointer on the screen is demonstrated at 33 seconds into the clip.
 * Your focus on the "problems" with Engelbart's design is irrelevant. What matters is who came up with the basic idea, not who perfected it. For example, Engelbart and Nelson are considered to be the inventors of hypertext, the Wright brothers are considered to be the inventors of sustained, powered fixed-wing flight, and Edison is considered to be the inventor of the first practical incandescent light bulb (that is, using carbonized bamboo as the filament), even though the World Wide Web, practical monoplane designs, and the tungsten light bulb were all invented later by others.
 * Also, I note that you have again failed to submit any evidence in support of your claims, particularly whether Mallebrein actually conceived or implemented anything ahead of Engelbart's team, which by July 1965 had already conceived of and implemented the mouse. Notice the detailed photographs on page 91 and the description starting on page 92. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:10, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the video link, my search resulted in a different video that did not include more than a screen view shaky tiny mouse movement. BTW: Telefunken delivered trackballs in the early 1960 to the German air traffic control and the Mallebrein mouse is just a bottom up turned trackball made, to let universities avoid to use a saw on their tables. So I see no evidence that Engelbart was first. Schily (talk) 14:57, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That's funny. At first you were being so specific about the flaws in Engelbart's mouse design. After I presented links above to specific documentary evidence that Engelbart's team clearly had an operational mouse by July 1965, you suddenly became very nonspecific and focused on the trackball instead.  Sorry, that's a totally different device.  We're talking about the computer mouse.  Not the trackball.  Very different user interface devices.  It requires far less dexterity and  practice to use a mouse, as opposed to accurately spinning a trackball.  It also requires more empty desk space to properly use a mouse versus a trackball.  There are good reasons for why most desktop computers ship by default with mice, not trackballs.
 * Also, I note that you're still haven't linked to or posted citations to any evidence of a mouse (not a trackball) predating Bill English's July 1965 report. The logical inference is that you don't have any evidence to refute the gigantic body of literature that has unanimously stated for decades that Engelbart invented the mouse.  (Which, along with hypertext, is why he went on to win the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Lovelace Medal, etc. and to have been the subject of symposia in 1998 and 2008.)
 * As Dean Wigmore famously wrote, "The nonproduction of evidence that would naturally have been produced by an honest and therefore fearless claimant permits the inference that its tenor is unfavorable to the party's cause."
 * Next week, I will be rewriting this article to more clearly stress that Engelbart's group at SRI ARC had the first working mouse at least as of July 1965 and also coined the term, though they did not invent the ball mouse which was the first mouse design to gain widespread consumer acceptance when it shipped with the Apple Macintosh. --Coolcaesar (talk) 03:51, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If you cannot verify that such a mouse existed before October 2, 1968 and has been presented to the public, I am going to revert this. Note that you did not give such a verification yet. The video you mentioned is from December 1968. Schily (talk) 11:12, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The NASA Techdoc is something that verifies that the computer mouse existed in mid-1965, at least it shows pictures and has a lot of data on how useful the mouse is for the user. This is a public document and has been mentioned by other sources. --Frmorrison (talk) 14:40, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I know this document, but you cannot verify that it has been published before December 1968 - It looks like a secret internal document and thus does not help to verify that Engelbart was ahead of Mallebrein. -Schily(talk) 15:29, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Is it your position that the title page was backdated? - MrOllie (talk) 15:37, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The report, which was never classified as secret, says it was published in July 1965 and its references do not go beyond April 1965. While it is possible to backdate a report, there are other sources that say in the mid-60s the computer mouse was being worked by Engelbart so when different sources say the same thing, we must assume it is true.--Frmorrison (talk) 16:53, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * No primary sources....give a newspaper that reported about that paper or give a verification when the report has been entered into a public library. Schily (talk) 18:02, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
 * OK. Thierry Bardini writes in 'Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing': "The first report of the mouse appeared in a July 1965 report to NASA-Langley written by English, Engelbart, and Bonnie Huddart, and entitled "Computer Aided Display Control" (Contract NAS-I-3988, report NTIS N66-30204)." - MrOllie (talk) 18:06, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

No, it is a verified (by the US patent office) fact that the paper in question is a secret internal paper and was not available in the public before June 21, 1967. In other words, you would need to decide between one of the following claims: In addition, if we follow the Wikipedia rules, we cannot claim that Rainer Mallebrein did not do verifiable research related to the mouse before October 2, 1968 and at the same time include claims about Engelbart that are based on secret internal information only. Even more, since I know a person who has been able to get the secret information from the German patent office that verifies that Konrad Zuse did not get a patent on the Computer because IBM and the US occupying forces prevented this from happening, it may be possible to verify that Telefunken filed a patent claim in 1965 already. If we are able to get that information from the German patent office, we could verify that Mallebrein was definitely first. If we cannot verify this, Mallebrein and Engelbart did work contemporarily. Schily (talk) 15:13, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
 * There was no public information about what Engelbart did before June 21, 1967
 * Engelbart did not receive a patent granted for his mouse.
 * Whether Bill English's report was secret or not is irrelevant to the fact that Engelbart was first. Namely, his research group had already arrived at the basic concept of the mouse by July 1965 and were using one to select text on a screen, though they failed to develop the specific mouse mechanism that Apple would eventually popularize with the general public in January 1984. Every journalist, historian, and sociologist to look at this has concluded that Engelbart was first. (Try searching Google Books for the following (without the quote marks) "engelbart mouse inventor". It returns over 1,700 publications.)
 * It sounds like you are entirely unfamiliar with the history of U.S. government-funded scientific research in the Cold War period. As this 1999 article explains, in June 1945, President Truman ordered that U.S. government-funded scientific research reports should be made available to the public. Anyone could obtain copies of reports upon demand by supplying the correct accession number and paying a small fee for the duplication of a copy from paper or microfilm.  And the government also published and distributed bibliographic indexes to help scientific researchers stay informed about what reports they could request.  The 1999 article primarily complains about how reports from 1961 and earlier became more difficult to access after they were transferred to the Library of Congress, but that would not have affected Bill English's 1965 report for what was then a NASA-funded project. In fact, the above-linked copy scanned by the Internet Archive bears an accession number on the front cover which corresponds to the one in the current NTIS database for that report.  (The Internet Archive probably obtained the report by asking NTIS to make a duplicate from their microfilm records.)   Thus, it is ludicrous to contend that English's report was a secret, or unpublished.  If you are contending that English's report is a primary source and a secondary source is necessary, I should note that apart from Bardini's book, the OED also cites English's 1965 report as the first publication of the use of the term "mouse" as referring to the pointing device.
 * Also, no amount of prevaricating on your part can change what actually happened: Engelbart was granted a patent in 1970, which has been routinely cited by subsequent mouse-related patents as prior art. Mallebrein never got a patent. Furthermore, English's 1965 report was publicly available through NTIS's predecessor agencies like OTS and CFSTI and would have been sent to federal depository libraries that had agreed to accept federally-funded scientific reports.  Under Wikipedia's policies (specifically WP:V and WP:NOT), it is the published record that controls.  Thus, an unpublished patent application (if one even exists) is irrelevant.  If you attempt to rely upon such a hypothetical, unpublished document to support the assertion that Mallebrein had invented the mouse before Engelbart, and that contention has not been published anywhere else, then you are attempting to publish original research in violation of WP:NOR.  It is a fundamental Wikipedia policy that Wikipedia is never a first publisher of original research. Editors who violate WP:NOR tend to not retain their editing privileges for very long.
 * Finally, I note that once again, you have failed to present actual documentary evidence---merely speculation that some might exist. (Your tactic is known as a "proof surrogate," and it's one of the first things that students are taught to recognize in critical thinking courses.) Under WP:NOT, there is no room for unsourced speculation on Wikipedia. I will be making the necessary revisions to this article within the next week or so. You can always come back and reopen this discussion when you actually have concrete evidence. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:19, 12 January 2017 (UTC)


 * You still fail to do scientific research. As mentioned: If the paper in question had been available in the public, the US patent office did not grant a patent and since you asked to discuss only things that have been known to the public, you still cannot verify that Engelbart was before Mallebrein. Schily (talk) 14:43, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * We can rely on all sources that are known to the public today. We don't have to restrict ourselves to what was known to the public in 1965. English's report is fine, your phone calls with Mallebrein (for example) are not. - MrOllie (talk) 15:09, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * In order to use the paper in question for what you like, you would need to verify that it was available to the public in 1965 and this is not possible as the US patent office verified that it was not available to the public. Schily (talk) 15:17, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I think there's some kind of communication failure happening here. The document shows that English and Engelbart had a mouse in the lab by 1965, I don't think anyone is trying to claim that the public (or anyone else) knew about it in 1965. - MrOllie (talk) 15:33, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You seem to misunderstand that you need to verify that this really happened and this is what you fail to do. In other words, as the document was not published in 1965, it therefore is not worth more than a statement from Mallebrein. Schily (talk) 16:10, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * We have third party, secondary sources that verify it happened by 1965 (Bardini's book). That's all we need. Any arguing we might do here on when and how the primary source was published is original research and is moot as far as Wikipedia content goes. - MrOllie (talk) 16:20, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If your quotation is correct, then this book does not verify more than that it happened before y2000. Schily (talk) 16:25, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * That might be your interpretation, but it sure is not the Wikipedia community's. - MrOllie (talk) 16:39, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * When a third party book from a reputable publisher says the mouse first appeared in a 1965 report and we can even at the 1965 report ourselves to verify, then per the Wikipedia rules we must consider all of it to be true. Until another published report from a reputable publisher says otherwise, the creator of the computer mouse will not change. --Frmorrison (talk) 16:48, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
 * When another entity (the US patent office) which has a higher reputation says something different, then your source is obviously not reliable enough. Schily (talk) 15:25, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If you are trying to make the ludicrous implication that a 1965 publication should have precluded a 1970 patent on a 1967 application, it has been long established in U.S. law that a prior publication would not have precluded a patent if it did not exhibit a substantial representation of the invention in full, clear, and exact terms. The 1965 paper briefly describes the general concept of the mouse but does not describe the very specific physical mechanisms claimed in the 1970 patent as issued.  In any event, as I and others have already pointed out, the decisive issue under Wikipedia policies is that the 1965 paper by Bill English, a primary source, shows that Engelbart's team already had an operational mouse by 1965 (in the general sense of a pointing device moving around a surface) and we have two secondary sources, the Bardini book and the OED, that concur that the English paper is the first publication of such a device.
 * Despite multiple requests for published reliable sources in compliance with Wikipedia policy that would show that Mallebrein conceived of the mouse prior to July 1965 and/or reduced the idea to practice prior to July 1965, you have offered nothing but innuendo and speculation. I am going to edit the article to make it clearer that the Telefunken mouse postdated Engelbart. --Coolcaesar (talk) 03:19, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what's got you two so worked up. It's not really possible to know that the creation or invention of one mouse postdated the other; just report what we have reliable sources for. Dicklyon (talk) 03:28, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Please inform yourself about the patent law. In the USA, (in former times) a patent could be issued even though there was a publication before, but this was limited to one year. So the fact that a patent has been issued verifies that the information you refer to was not in the public in 1965.
 * BTW: I just asked our patent case officer to dig in the patent database in order to find the Telefunken filing from around 1965. I therefore ask you to revert your article edits until we have a feedback for this attempt. Schily (talk) 12:56, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Even if your patent officer turns something up, that would be a primary source and our article should continue to follow the secondary sources. - MrOllie (talk) 14:49, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Has anyone claimed that the information of the invention was known to the public in 1965? I don't think so.  So the fact that Patent Office didn't think it was is not in conflict with anything, is it? Dicklyon (talk) 15:21, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You would need to learn what a primary source is and what a secondary source is. The named paper that is supposed to be from Engelbart from 1965 is a primary source. If there was a trustworthy source that would verify that this paper had been published in 1965, this would be a secondary source that verifies publication and date (no more), but such a source does not exist. So the Xerox paper that is supposed to be from 1965 is void for Wikipedia.
 * Now we have a patent request from 25 August 1966 that was issued 26 August 1966 to the German patent office by Rainer Mallebrein. It describes a device that uses a "Rollkugel" for its overall operation (DE000001487707A). So this is a verifiable secondary source that verifies that Telefunken worked on that topic before 21 June 1967, which is the earliest verified date from a trustworthy source about that topic and this patent request predates the Xerox invention. Schily (talk) 16:16, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I think it's awesome if you can show us this doc, giving more info about when the team in Germany had this idea, or made it. But let's not let this devolve into Wikipedians making claims for who did what first. All we can do is present what sources tell us.  I don't think primary sources are "void" to wikipedia, and I don't see why you're calling a rejected application "secondary", but let's just report what's there.  Where can we see  it? Dicklyon (talk) 16:30, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry, you still do not seem to understand what a primary/secondary source is and what information is verified by which kind of source. A primary source is a self published document such as the Xerox document that is supposed to be from 1965 - it does not verify anything. A secondary source is a source from identifiable trustworthy other people, e.g. the patent office. The patent office information definitely verifies a date. If you like to verify that Xerox did work on the mouse before 21 June 1967 or even 26 August 1966, you would need to present a document that verifies the existence of related information in the public with a non forgeable date from before 26 August 1966. Schily (talk) 17:29, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * To quote Reliable source examples: "Patent applications and issued patents must be treated as self-published, non-independent, primary sources for Wikipedia purposes."
 * But that's an essay, you may say! Well, Verifiability says "Anyone can create a personal web page or publish their own book, and also claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published media, such as books, patents, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, personal or group blogs (as distinguished from newsblogs, above), content farms, Internet forum postings, and social media postings, are largely not acceptable as sources." - MrOllie (talk) 18:07, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * If you did read my previous text, you would know that a patent office database entry definitely verifies one item: a time stamp. Schily (talk) 18:14, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You probably didn't read what you wrote either. What's all this about Xerox? Dicklyon (talk) 18:59, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * This discussion has (thankfully) faded away. But for the record and future reference: The German patent application introduced by Schily is *not* pertinent to the mouse technology. While it uses the term "Rollkugel", this term refers to a stationary trackball here.
 * The full text of the application is available in the online archive of the DPMA (German patent office): https://depatisnet.dpma.de/DepatisNet/depatisnet?action=pdf&docid=DE000001487707A&xxxfull=1. The figure on the last page shows the trackball arrangement, with an additional radial push/pull rod to control a Z axis input. Hence what is described is essentially a 3D joystick, not a mouse. 2001:9E8:6360:1E00:D82A:6EE:F306:413F (talk) 14:57, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

Discrepancies in reported Telefunken Rollkugel Gray code (Notes section)
I have access to an original Rollkugel and have double-checked the number of code sequences produced per revolution. A full revolution of the encoder produces 5 repeats of the 14-state pattern, resulting in 70 codes per revolution, and hence a DPI resolution of 43.5 counts per inch. (The circumference of the encoder's friction wheel is Pi*13 mm = 1.61".)

By the way: The order in which the four code bits are shown in the table in the Notes section is the preferred one. It matches the order in which the bits were named on the Rollkugel's plug (successive pin numbers as defined by the plug manufacturer and DIN standard). I have now updated the code table on http://e-basteln.de/computing/rollkugel/rollkugel/#internals to match this order. 2001:9E8:6373:3300:49A2:42F9:1A71:92F9 (talk) 16:00, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

India Education Program course assignment
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