A ‘mouse’ is not a mouse | + History


It is a small device that came into our lives in 1981 and, since then, it has become essential because, although there are more and more touch screens, we still need it to operate the computer.

It’s fascinating how, over time, words can vary in meaning or just expand it. For example, if 50 years ago someone had said they had a mouse on their desk, there would have been races to find the rat poison. Now, on the other hand, it is normal for all offices to have mice on the tables. To prevent possible unnecessary scares, there are those who prefer to use the English term ‘mouse’ to make it clear that they do not refer to the small rodent but to the device that helps us when operating the computer.

In April 1981 the brand Xerox put on sale the first personal computer with this peripheral, which had been designed during the 1960s by engineer Douglas Engelbart in his Stanford research laboratory. His biggest dream was to make machines easy to handle by all kinds of people and, thanks to this device, he achieved it. However, he did not give her that name. Engelbart and his team called it Computer-Aided Display Control, which didn’t have much of a commercial hook. It is not very clear when popular language renamed it with the name we know it now, but the truth is that 41 years ago this Wednesday it began to spread throughout the world in a much more friendly plague than those carried out by its namesakes of meat and bones.

The mouse is an animal that arouses contradictory feelings. If it’s fiction, call it Mickey, Ratatouille or Pérez, we like it; but Oh, if a real one shows up at home! And look, both species have lived together for centuries… We have a type of relationship that biologists call synanthropy, which is the ability of some animals to adapt to natural environments modified by humans. That is why, wherever we are, pigeons, sparrows and mice appear.

Imagine the joy the rodents had when they discovered that the ‘sapiens’ had developed agricultureThey lived in stable houses and accumulated grain to spend the winter. Well that’s what happened in the Neolithicwhen our ancestors stopped being hunter-gatherers to become sedentary peasants.

One of the people who has researched this question is Thomas Cucchi, of the French National Center for Scientific Research. He is a specialist in zooarchaeology and has written some of the most important works on the European expansion of ‘Mus domesticus’, that is, the common mouse. Thanks to the excavations, it is possible to follow how this little animal appeared in the areas where agriculture also appeared. It is common for archaeologists to locate their fragile skeletons in homes and barns. And it seems they were already a headache, because in a site in Jordan next to the Dead Sea dated from 9,000 a. C., structures have been identified to store grain that were built suspended in the air to avoid contact with the ground. According to experts, it would respond to an attempt to prevent animals from accessing its interior.

Cucchi has also found that rodents were fond of traveling by boat. To the extent that maritime trade it intensified in the Mediterranean, and grain was transported from one point to another, the mice sneaked into the holds to eat as if there were no tomorrow. It’s not just an assumption. In more than one of the underwater surveys to study sunken ships, remains of our little ‘domesticus’ friends have been found.

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Furthermore, according to zooarchaeology Silvia Valenzuelamember of the Higher Council for Scientific Research, one of the first places on the Peninsula where this type of mouse lived was in the Iberian settlement of Calafell around the 4th century BC. of C; quite understandable thing because it was a very important point of maritime trade at a time when Greeks and Phoenicians jumped from one port to another. Little did they think that, apart from their merchandise, they were transporting stowaways that would spread everywhere and that in the 20th century they would give their name to a small device that makes our lives much easier.


other inventions

Douglas Engelbart has been one of the most influential people in the development of home computers. Apart from the mouse, he made it possible to work with different windows on the screen and devised multimedia files, where text, image and sound can be combined. Things that are now part of our lives. Engelbart died in 2013 at the age of 88.

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