Bill English, co-creator of the mouse, has died. He was 91.

I have an undying love for computer peripherals, but especially mice. At one point, I owned half a dozen mice despite only owning a single computer. My friends became rightfully concerned that my desire for mice was vastly overshadowing my capacity to actually use said mice, and rightly so. I’ve since downsized to just three mice across two devices, but I still have that itch to get my hand on the latest and greatest in mouse technology.

So it came as a bit of a shock to hear that Bill English, one of the Stanford researchers that first created the mouse, had died.

The inventor of the mouse is largely credited to Doug Engelbart as he came up with the original idea, but it was with English’s help that the two created the world’s first mouse in 1963. Little more than a block of wood with two wheels and some wires, the first mouse used potentiometers to measure the voltage as the two wheels turned. The bigger the voltage, the further whatever digital pointer that the mouse was hooked up to would move.

As for why it was called “mouse,” that’s just because the thing sort of looked like a rodent thanks to the cord coming out the back.

The mouse might have remained a technical curiosity at the Stanford Research Institute if it weren’t for what would be later dubbed “The Mother Of All Demos,” which was a tech demonstration put on by SRI in 1968. This demo–hosted by Engelbart–would showcase everything that we’d recognize today as staples of personal computing, including word processing, hyperlinks, video conferencing, and a demonstration of the world’s first mouse in action.

English would leave SRI in 1971 to go work for Xerox and refine the mouse design by replacing those two wheels with a ball. That would remain the industry standard until optical mice entered the market in the early 2000s.

It’s hard to imagine that the sleek, plastic, rubber-coated, and RGB-flashing designs we know today can all be traced to this humble piece of wood and the humble man who created it. Rest easy, Mr. English.

Source: New York Times