Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

Appendix A. The One-Button Mouse: History and Future

Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse.

—Chaucer, “The Squire's Tale”

I have been variously castigated and applauded for creating the one-button mouse and some of the basic methods for using it. Questions from readers of drafts of this book indicated that they thought that the way the Macintosh worked was the way that earlier mouse-driven systems from Xerox PARC worked and were curious as to the differences. This appendix describes the mouse-based systems that I saw at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) when I was a visitor there. The even earlier use of the mouse at Douglas Englebart's group at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was embedded in a system that was decades ahead of ...