The first computer mouse was made of wood.

The object that introduced a familiar computer accessory did not resemble today's molded plastic mouse. Its wooden housing enclosed a mechanical arrangement designed to translate movement across a surface into a position on a screen. A button supplied another way to interact with the computer once the pointer reached its target.

Engelbart's group at Stanford Research Institute was exploring how computers could help people work with information. Selecting a location on a display was one part of that larger problem. Rather than treating the mouse as an isolated gadget, the team developed it alongside software for navigating, editing, and sharing material.

Credit belongs to both the idea and its implementation. Engelbart is associated with inventing the mouse, while English turned the concept into a working device. The Computer History Museum dates the surviving prototype to 1964 and describes its two sharp tracking wheels as facing at right angles to each other.

The wooden shell was a practical prototype enclosure rather than a statement about future manufacturing. The museum identifies the material as redwood and credits the SRI machine shop with crafting it. What mattered experimentally was whether the mechanism gave people a useful way to point, select, and move through information.

The wheels measured movement along two different directions. Together, those measurements could describe motion over a flat working surface. This was not the rolling ball mechanism familiar from many later mice, and it was not an optical sensor. The underlying goal was similar, but the first hardware solution was visibly different.

Engelbart demonstrated his team's broader system at a San Francisco computing conference on 9 December 1968. The event later became known as the Mother of All Demos. The mouse appeared alongside capabilities including document editing, links, and remote collaboration, showing its role within an integrated environment rather than as a standalone novelty.

The prototype is now part of the Computer History Museum's collection, donated by SRI International. In announcing the acquisition, the museum explained that its earlier exhibit mouse had been a faithful replica made by English. That distinction is valuable: an accurate reconstruction can explain a design, but the original object documents the actual experiment.

The mouse offered a way to act on something visible instead of specifying every action entirely through typed commands. That did not eliminate keyboards. It created a complementary input method, with pointing and typing serving different tasks. Modern computers still commonly combine the two, even though their internal technologies have changed substantially.

Its history also cautions against imagining invention as a finished consumer product arriving all at once. A research prototype, a public demonstration, and widespread commercial adoption are separate milestones. The 1964 wooden device establishes an early working design; it does not mean ordinary households were buying computer mice that year.

The wooden mouse and the QWERTY keyboard illustrate different layers of interaction. A keyboard supplies discrete characters and commands, while a pointing device supplies position and selection. Engelbart’s demonstration brought these capabilities into a working environment, rather than suggesting that pointing would make every other form of input unnecessary.