Mondo Knows Facts
The first computer mouse was made of wood
Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964 using a wooden shell and internal metal wheels
Douglas Engelbart and his colleague Bill English built the first prototype mouse at Stanford Research Institute in 1964. The device featured a carved wooden casing containing two perpendicular metal wheels that tracked movement across a surface. Engelbart demonstrated the mouse publicly in 1968 during a legendary computing presentation.
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Tags: hardware, mouse, stanford
The first computer mouse was made of wood: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964 using a wooden shell and internal metal wheels. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a technology fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.