The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse: The Unexpected History of the Computer Mouse

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

In 1968, a researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controlled by a small wooden block with a wire trailing out the back.

But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this episode, we follow the tangled history of the world's most common computer peripheral and its origins as a Cold War secret. We'll also find out why your cursor is tilted 45 degrees.

In this episode

• The Mother of All Demos - the 1968 presentation that changed computing
• DATAR - a classified Cold War radar project, and an unlikely contribution to computing history
• The Rollkugel - a German parallel invention and a patent rejection
• Xerox PARC and Apple - how the mouse finally reached the world

Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Brocken Spectre"
  • "Shape of a Gun" 
  • "Hedgehog's Dilemma"
  • "Eternal Light"

Additional Reading

The Mother of All Demos. (n.d.). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Computer History Museum. (n.d.). DATAR trackball (Object ID 500004669). CHM Revolution: Input & Output. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/350/1881

Bardini, T. (2000). Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, coevolution, and the origins of personal computing. Stanford University Press. https://archive.org/details/bootstrapping00thie

Hill-Khurana, J. (2020, May). A brief history of the mouse cursor, from Engelbart to PARC. https://jameshk.com/mouse-cursor

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Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. 

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