Apple has always had a troubled history with mice. Not everyone liked the circular model of the original iMac, the Mighty Mouse received criticism for frequent breakdowns with its ball and the charge of the Magic Mouse of our days… well, I better not mention it.
But despite that, you have to remember that it was Apple that popularized the mouse and its cursor interface on home computers. And while it wasn’t the company that invented it, it all started with the original Apple mouse in 1983. Let’s review what life that mouse had and what happened to it.
A revolutionary idea with a bad start
The first mouse Apple released was called the Lisa Mouse, as is (although its model number was A9M0050). Their appearance beige was consistent with the design of computers at the time, with very square and industrial edges; and a single button. The connection interface was a DE-9 port, of which no trace remains. It was sold with the Apple Lisa, one of Apple’s first computers, at a price of $9.9995. You don’t even need to adjust for inflation, right? It was too expensive a computer for the eighties.
I insist on not belittling the feat: this is the first computer that was sold with a mouse and a graphical interface with the cursor on the screen. The normal thing at that time were command screens and a keyboard, nothing more. It was such a great revolution that Steve Jobs remembered it no less than in the keynote from the original iPhone. Apple had gotten the idea from a Xerox patent, which the company scrapped in what may be its biggest mistake and Steve Jobs rescued from oblivion.
But still the Apple Lisa didn’t sell well. it was too expensive and the price difference with the IBM computers of that time was too much. And with it, the first Apple mouse ended up disappearing to become part of history in museums. It was soon replaced by the Macintosh Mouse, a mouse that appeared with the original Macintosh and just turned 39 years old.
Image | Wikipedia