Mouse

Today, the mouse is an essential input device for all modern computers but it wasn't so long ago that
computers had no mouse and no graphical user interface. Data was entered by typing commands on
a keyboard.

The first computer mouse was invented in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart at the
Stanford Research Institute. (He is also one of the inventors of hypertext.) The
first mouse used two wheels positioned at a 90-degree angle to each other to
keep track of the movement.

It was 8 years later in 1972 that Bill English developed the design further by inventing what is known
as the "Ball Mouse" that we know today. The ball replaced the wheels and was capable of monitoring
movement in any diection. The ball came into contact with two rollers that in turn spun wheels with
graduations on them that could be turned into electrical pulses representing direction and speed.

At the time Bill English was working for Xerox Parc (Palo Alto Research Centre) the research and
development centre set-up by Xerox to 'design the future of computing'. The mouse became part of
the ground breaking Xerox Alto computer system which was the first minicomputer system to offer a
graphical user interface.

It would be another 8 years before the mouse would be developed any further. An optical mouse was
developed in around 1980, eliminating the ball which often became dirty from rolling round the desktop,
negatively affecting its operation. In 1988, US patent no. 4751505 was issued for an optical mouse
invented by Lisa M. Williams and Robert S. Cherry, which was to be sold commercially with Xerox
products, such as the Xerox STAR. This mouse was produced for $17 and sold for $35. Despite this,
it wasn't until around 1998 that optical mice became a commercially viable alternative to the ball
mouse and infiltrated the mass consumer market., thanks to the increase in microcontroller processing
power and the reduction in component costs.

Today the optical mouse has completely replaced the ball mouse, being supplied as standard with all
new computers.

THE FIRST TRACKB ALL

The trackball was actually invented 11 years BEFORE the mouse, in 1952. It
was invented by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff as part of a computerized
battlefield information system called DATAR, initiated by the Canadian Navy.
It used a standard five-pin bowling ball as its trackball, which is smaller than
the more common 10-pin bowling ball.

T H E F IR ST POR T AB L E C OMPU T ER
Well, perhaps that should be “movable” computer… The IBM 5100 Portable
Computer was introduced in 1975, weighed 25 kg (55 lb), was the size of a
small suitcase and needed external power to operate. It held everything in the
same unit, packing in a processor, ROM (several hundreds of KB) and RAM
(16-64 KB), a five-inch CRT display, keyboard and a tape drive, which was an
amazing feat at the time. It also came with built-in BASIC and/or APL. The
different models of the IBM 5100 sold for $8,975 – $19,975.

THE FIRST LAPTOP COMPUTER

The first laptop computer (or notebook) was the Grid Compass 1100 (called
the GRiD) and was designed in 1979 by a British industrial designer, Bill
Moggridge. The computer didn’t start selling until 1982, then featuring a
320×200 screen, an Intel 8086 processor, 340 KB of magnetic bubble memory
(a now obsolete, non-volatile memory type) and a 1200 bps modem. It
weighed 5 kg (11 lb) and cost $8-10,000. The GRiD was mainly used by
NASA and the US military.

THE FIRST RAM

Arguably the first (writable) random access memory was Magnetic Core
Memory (also called Ferrite-Core Memory) and was invented in 1951 as a
result of work done by An Wang at Harvard University’s Computation Lab and
Jay Forrester at MIT.

Core memory was a family of related technologies that used the magnetic
properties of materials to give them a similar functionality to transistors. They
stored their information using the polarity of tiny, magnetic ceramic rings with
wires threaded through them. Unlike today’s RAM, core memory could keep
its information even after the power was turned off.

HDD
The IBM Model 350 Disk File was the first hard disk drive and was part of the
IBM 305 RAMAC computer that IBM started delivering in 1956 (mainly
intended for business accounting). It had 50 24-inch discs that together could
store about 4.4 MB of data. The Model 350 spun at 1200 rpm, had a data
transfer rate of 8,800 characters per second and an access time of
approximately one second.
Printer

The history of computer printers started in 1938 when Chester Carlson invented a
dry printing process called electrophotography commonly called a Xerox, the
foundation technology for laser printers to come.
In 1953, the first high-speed printer was developed by Remington-Rand for use
on the Univac computer.

The laser printer was invented by Gary Starkweather at XEROX in 1969. His
initial prototype was a modified laser copier where he had disabled the
imaging system and introduced a spinning drum with eight mirrored sides. The
first commercial implementation of a laser printer didn’t happen until IBM
released the IBM model 3800 in 1976. It could pretty much fill up a room on its
own.