a fascinating trip to the prestigious Xerox PARC laboratory

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The mouse hit the market with the Xerox Star, a $16,500 personal computer

If your mouse has ever stopped working, perhaps because it ran out of battery, you probably remember how difficult it is to try to do anything on your computer. only with the keyboard. This peripheral is not only one of the best allies for productivity and games, but it is also a practically indispensable element of desktop computing.

The world has changed a lot since it appeared the first computer mouse in the 1960s. It was a wooden device with metal wheels and a solitary button on top. Currently we have the possibility of choosing our favorite accessory from a wide range of options whose price, generally speaking, varies between 2 and 400 euros.

The first commercial mouse

Now, have you ever wondered what the first commercial mouse was? To find the answer we must travel back to 1969. Back then, Xerox was exploring new business avenues. The American company had presented nothing less than the first photocopier in history in 1959, and dominated this market, but had the need to continue growing.

Xerox had a research center in Rochester, New York, but management gave the green light to the creation of a second research center aimed at developing the concept of “The office of the future”. He Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) He was literally on the other side of the United States, which in a way gave his team a greater degree of freedom.

One of the laboratory’s most notable projects was called Xerox Alto. It was a personal computer that seemed from the future because it integrated a bitmap screen, an operating system with a graphical user interface (GUI) and Ethernet connectivity. Besides, came with a mousean innovative accessory that would evolve significantly before reaching the public a few years later.

The first two mouse concepts from Xerox

The first Xerox mouse worked on wheels and had three buttons arranged one below the other, something that was not entirely practical. The second concept got rid of the wheels, had two vertical buttons and incorporated a ball that offered greater precision. However, these options, in addition to being expensive, were sensitive to dirt, which detracted from the user experience.

Xerox Alto (left), Xerox Star (right)

But Xerox engineers came up with a quite different alternative. They developed an optical mouse with no moving parts that addressed the problems of the previous concepts. That optical mouse was not similar to current optical mice. I needed one special mat stamped with circles to work, but even with this requirement, it was much cheaper than the other proposals.

The Xerox Alto did not become a commercial product. Charles Thacker, chief engineer at Xerox, said the first computer cost the company $12,000, so the market price would have been about $40,000. The innovations of this computer laid the foundations for the Xerox Starwhich was offered with a keyboard and mouse in 1981 for $16,500 ($56,000 today).

With the aforementioned movement, the mouse that had been in the laboratory for so long became a commercial product, although the price of the Xerox Star was prohibitive, so this computer was not a bestseller. Some time before, in 1979 to be exact, there was the well-known visit of Steve Jobs to Xerox PARCwhere he understood almost perfectly where personal computing was heading.

Images | Marcin Wichary | Michael Hicks | Bubba73 | Coolcaesar | Xerox PARC (Richard F. Lyon)

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