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On. 1968, Doug Engelbart unveiled his revolutionary new invention:"The X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System." Or, as he and his team liked to refer to their new wooden device, “the mouse”

For years, Engelbart bad been thinking about how to make computers adapt to people. Instead of the other way around. He and his team at the Stanford Research Institute had been working on ideas to do just that, and they presented them at a San Francisco computing conference their demonstration was astonishingly ahead of Its time.

In a day before email the Internet, When entire companies might have just one computer. (or none), Engelbart asked his audience to consider the farfetched notion of a computer on each person’s desk, responsive to every need. Then he grabbed his prototyped mouse and took the crowd on a tour of the future. He showed there such radical things as copying and pasting, folders, hypertext, using different windows on the screen, even working jointly with a remote user—all of which seemed about as fantastic as a Star Trek phaser. People in the audience actually started climbing on stage to see him use his “mouse” to move around what he called a tracking spot on the screen (we know it as a curser).

That demonstration is sometimes referred to as “the mother of all demos.” It not only introduced the new-ubiquitous mouse—it offered a 20/20 vision of a revolution to come.

The first mouse available to the public was developed by Xerox in the late 1970s, and cost $400. In the 1980s, Steve Jobs tasked a team of designers with the job of creating a mouse for Apple that would cost one-tenth that price. The team led by Dan Hovey, built their first prototype from parts that included the roller ball from some Ban deodorant and a plastic butter dish.

Source: Excerpted from “The Greatest Science Stories Never Told” by Rick Beyer