It wasn’t Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.
Although the mouse only became famous for being one of the charms of the Apple Macintosh computer, from 1984, the idea appeared much earlier. Its owner is electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart, who died in 2013 at the age of 88.
It all happened in 1963, in the laboratories of Stanford University, in the United States. At that time, Engelbart was developing a project whose objective, in his words, was “to increase the human intellect”.
The exaggeration of the definition even made sense: his team was researching artifacts that facilitated the interaction between men and computers, at a time when these machines practically did not exist. It was as if someone, today, was concerned with creating a language for us to talk to aliens.
And the mouse was the great insight of these people. It had wheels instead of the current ball, and it only made vertical and horizontal lines.
The ball only appeared years later, when Xerox hired Engelbart’s right-hand man, Bill English, to develop its first computers. It debuted in 1973, with the prototype Xerox Alto, which came with a mouse much more similar to those of today.
The first computer with a mouse that people could have at home was Alto’s «son», the Xerox Star, launched on the market in 1981. But the mouse’s popularity only came three years later, when Steve Jobs «was inspired» on Xerox machines to create your Macintosh.