The little old mouse turns 40 next week

BANGALORE,INDIA: He is not called Mickey. But he is as naughty a mouse as the ever young cartoon character, which conquered the silver screen and the animation industry some eighty years back.

He is the mouse who made Mickey and Minnie crawl into your drawing room and the computer screen in many shape and drape.

And next week the computer mouse, which animated many a cartoon character and redefined the way we used the computer graphics, is turning forty; to be precise, on December 9.

Ever since its birth the tiny little mouse has only one mission - linking the computer and the user, though it has undergone many an incarnation. The computer mouse, originated at the Stanford Research Institute, derives from the resemblance of early models (which had a cord attached to the rear part of the device, suggesting the idea of a tail) to the common mouse.

When Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California designed a computer controller encased in a carved-out wooden block, with wheels mounted on the underbelly, one researcher nicknamed it a 'mouse'.

“We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name,” Engelbart recalled later. “But it didn't.” It got a public debut on December 9, 1968 when Engelbart gave a 90-minute presentation on of a working network computer system in San Francisco.

The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals.

Later apple bought the patent version of the mouse for its Macintosh in 1984 that secured the success of the invention.

It would celebrate its 40th birthday in the presence of its creator Engelbart, 83, in San Francisco.

Though the little ‘creature’ has revolutionized the way we used the computer, it may soon become an extinct species’.

Not just the laptop, even the desktops may soon become ‘mouseless’. HP is planning to push a mouse-less TouchSmart PC.

Today we have Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii, which show the potential for touch screens and movement sensors.

And the technology may soon prove to be ‘disastrous’ for the mouse.

According to a Gartner Research, the future of mouse is not that bright. The report says that the mouse will be in the picture for just about four or five years and it will have to give way to the touch screen technology.

So the 40-year-old computer mouse is probably ‘older’ than Mickey, which is as younger as it was on its birthday – alive and kicking. Still it’s time to wish the little creature ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’.