HOW SPACE TECH BENEFITS EARTH
A MOUSE FROM SPACE
“NASA hoped to make computers more interactive.”
When you purchase a desktop computer, a mouse will usually also be included. However, that wasn’t always the case. The mouse was created by American engineer Doug Engelbart back in the late 1960s for the Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart’s research was funded by NASA, who hoped to make computers, which at the time were being used as flight control systems and for simulations, more interactive. What Engelbart created was a handheld device that used two perpendicular wheels that were turned by pushing the mouse on the flat surface below it. The movement of these wheels would then move the cursor on the computer screen. Engelbart presented the new ‘mouse’ at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968, where thousands of engineers witnessed it for the first time. Since then the humble mouse has undergone several upgrades, with trackpads and laser tracking becoming the new normal.
INSIDE AN OPTICAL MOUSE
How these computer companions move a cursor on the screen.
Scroll wheel
This rolling wheel is connected to a switch mechanism that tracks the direction of movement and how much the wheel has rotated.
Microswitches
Two switches either side of the scroll wheel register when you click the mouse’s right and left buttons.
Cable
The digital signals generated by the chip are
