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Many readers will be familiar with Douglas Englebart’s 1968 so-called “Mother of All Demos”, in which he described many of the devices and technologies we would be using two or three decades later. Among these was a primitive computer mouse, but while famous it was by no means the earliest pointing device. At the recent Vintage Computer Festival Berlin, [Dmitriy Kostiuk] delivered a fascinating lecture of the history of the pointing device .

It’s a long video that we’ve placed below, and it’s an exhaustive examination of the topic from the earliest examples to the 1990s when mice became commoditized. It’s a surprise to find that the first pointing device was a trackball built for a 1950s Canadian warship, with a surprisingly modern-looking optical encoder.…