The earliest known written use of the term mouse or mice in reference to a computer pointing device is in Bill English's July 1965 publication, "Computer-Aided Display Control".

According to Roger Bates, a hardware designer under English, the term also came about because the cursor on the screen was, for an unknown reason, referred to as "CAT" and was seen by the team as if it would be chasing the new desktop device.

[7] The first recorded plural usage is "mice"; the online Oxford Dictionaries cites a 1984 use, and earlier uses include J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device" of 1968.

Benjamin's project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick.

[9] Another early trackball was built by Kenyon Taylor, a British electrical engineer working in collaboration with Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff.

Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving) system in 1952.

[12][13] Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) has been credited in published books by Thierry Bardini,[15] Paul Ceruzzi,[16] Howard Rheingold,[17] and several others[18][19][20] as the inventor of the computer mouse.

That November, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data.

[26] According to Roger Bates, a hardware designer under English, another reason for choosing this name was because the cursor on the screen was also referred to as "CAT" at this time.

[28][29] Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS) exploited different body movements – for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose – but ultimately the mouse won out because of its speed and convenience.

On 2 October 1968, three years after Engelbart's prototype but more than two months before his public demo, a mouse device named Rollkugelsteuerung (German for "Trackball control") was shown in a sales brochure by the German company AEG-Telefunken as an optional input device for the SIG 100 vector graphics terminal, part of the system around their process computer TR 86 and the TR 440 [de] main frame.

[35][36] As the name suggests and unlike Engelbart's mouse, the Telefunken model already had a ball (diameter 40 mm, weight 40 g[37]) and two mechanical 4-bit[37][38] rotational position transducers[37][39][38] with Gray code-like[37][38][nb 2] states, allowing easy movement in any direction.

[36][40][43][39] For the air traffic control system, the Mallebrein team had already developed a precursor to touch screens in form of an ultrasonic-curtain-based pointing device in front of the display.

[56] Clicking or pointing (stopping movement while the cursor is within the bounds of an area) can select files, programs or actions from a list of names, or (in graphical interfaces) through small images called "icons" and other elements.

3D design and animation software often modally chord many different combinations to allow objects and cameras to be rotated and moved through space with the few axes of movement mice can detect.

The Xerox PARC group also settled on the modern technique of using both hands to type on a full-size keyboard and grabbing the mouse when required.

[65] Modern computer mice took form at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) under the inspiration of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and at the hands of engineer and watchmaker André Guignard.

Later, more surface-independent optical mice use an optoelectronic sensor (essentially, a tiny low-resolution video camera) to take successive images of the surface on which the mouse operates.

[71] In combination with a wireless keyboard an inertial mouse can offer alternative ergonomic arrangements which do not require a flat work surface, potentially alleviating some types of repetitive motion injuries related to workstation posture.

Early 3D mice for velocity control were almost ideally isometric, e.g. SpaceBall 1003, 2003, 3003, and a device developed at Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR), cf.

Tablet digitizers are sometimes used with accessories called pucks, devices which rely on absolute positioning, but can be configured for sufficiently mouse-like relative tracking that they are sometimes marketed as mice.

This two-bit encoding per dimension had the property that only one bit of the two would change at a time, like a Gray code or Johnson counter, so that the transitions would not be misinterpreted when asynchronously sampled.

Featuring only a single data pin, the bus used a purely polled approach to device communications and survived as the standard on mainstream models (including a number of non-Apple workstations) until 1998 when Apple's iMac line of computers joined the industry-wide switch to using USB.

PS/2 mice also understand several commands for reset and self-test, switching between different operating modes, and changing the resolution of the reported motion vectors.

After the host sends a special command sequence, it switches to an extended format in which a fourth byte carries information about wheel movements.

[111] Mouse buttons are microswitches which can be pressed to select or interact with an element of a graphical user interface, producing a distinctive clicking sound.

Nearly all mice now have an integrated input primarily intended for scrolling on top, usually a single-axis digital wheel or rocker switch which can also be depressed to act as a third button.

When the movement of the mouse passes the value set for some threshold, the software will start to move the cursor faster, with a greater rate factor.

[117] The Macintosh design,[118] commercially successful and technically influential, led many other vendors to begin producing mice or including them with their other computer products (by 1986, Atari ST, Amiga, Windows 1.0, GEOS for the Commodore 64, and the Apple IIGS).

[121] FPSs naturally lend themselves to separate and simultaneous control of the player's movement and aim, and on computers this has traditionally been achieved with a combination of keyboard and mouse.