On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, jos wrote: and MARKETED it! "Invention" and "FIRST" are always on shaky ground in any real historical research. Telefunken didn't consider it important enough to patent. Most REAL inventors consider their projects to be faar too "obvious" to patent them. Wikipedia does mention the rollkugel! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse Picture of Engelbart's hand holding mouse, does however still call his "first". (I just made a correction to the Wikipedia article, where it listed the original Macintosh as 1994!) There are NUMEROUS changes needed to the article, but I figured that THAT one was at least not disputable. "Microsoft's mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginning Microsoft hardware." If "Microsoft hardware" is intended to be a proper noun for NAME of a division, then "hardware" should be capitalized. Otherwise, what happened to history of the Microsoft Z80 Softcard, which was an amazingly successful venture into hardware, and is even rumored to be WHY certain folk at IBM mistakenly thought that Microsoft was the source for CP/M. (no citations available) "However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the appearance of the Macintosh 128K (which included an updated version of the Lisa Mouse) in 1994,[24] and of the Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST in 1985." is arguably correct (other than the Mac date listed!) Mice were around, but the general public (Wikipedia AUTHORS?) didn't notice them until Mac. Who has some time to go clean up Wikipedia?

As an aside, didn't the much later Radio Shack mouse for the CoCo work like that? It plugged into the joystick port, and AFAIK needed no special software. -tony

That's a good point for history of inventions generally. Take printing; it was arguably invented in China first, but independently in Germany later. The later one is the one that took hold world-wide. For that matter, writing; invented independently in at least three if not four places, but out of those only two produced offspring that spread and flourished. paul