A wonderful trip to the prestigious Xerox PARC laboratory

If your mouse stops working, perhaps because the battery is dead, you probably remember how difficult it is to try to do anything on your computer. Only with keyboard. Not only is this peripheral one of the best allies for productivity and gaming, but it is also a practically indispensable item in desktop computing.

The world has changed a lot since the first computer mouse appeared in the 1960s, which was a wooden device with metal wheels and a single button on top. We currently have the possibility to choose our favorite accessory from a wide range of options whose price generally ranges 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 go back to 1969. At that time, Xerox was exploring New ways of working. The American company had introduced no less than the first camera in history in 1959, and dominated this market, but it needed to continue growing.

Xerox had a research center in Rochester, New York, but management gave the green light to establish a second research center aimed at developing the concept ofOffice of the future“The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was physically located on the other side of the United States, which in some ways 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 to have come from the future because it had a dot-matrix display, an operating system with a graphical user interface (GUI), and an Ethernet connection. next to, Came with mousean innovative accessory that would evolve significantly before it reached the public a few years later.

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

But Xerox engineers came up with a completely different alternative. They have developed an optical mouse With no moving parts to address the problems of previous concepts. This optical mouse was not similar to today’s optical mice. I needed one Special mat Sealed circuits to work, but even with this condition, it was much cheaper than other proposals.

The Xerox Alto never became 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. This computer’s innovations laid the foundations for Xerox Starwhich was introduced with a keyboard and mouse in 1981 for $16,500 ($56,000 today).

With the above movement, the mouse that had been in the laboratory for a long time became a commercial product The Xerox Star was expensive, so this computer was not a bestseller. Some time before that, in 1979 to be precise, there was a famous visit by Steve Jobs to Xerox PARC, where he fully understood where personal computing was going.

Photos | Marcin Wichari | Michael Hicks | Bubba73 | com. coolcesar | Xerox Park (Richard F. Lyons)

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