The trackball was invented by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR project in 1952. It used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, as it was a secret military project.[2]
Independently, Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype in 1963,[3] with the assistance of his colleague Bill English. They christened the device the mouse as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail and generally resembling the common mouse.[4] Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.[5]
The invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much larger project, aimed at augmenting human intellect.[6
