Original photo by MattKay/ iStock
Animal-based names are surprisingly common when it comes to units of measurement. In addition to horsepower (which usually measures the output of engines or motors) and hogsheads (today mostly used for alcohol), there’s also the mickey — a semi-official means of measuring the speed of a computer mouse. Named after a certain Disney character who’s probably the world’s most famous rodent, it’s specifically used to describe the smallest measurable movement the device can take. In real terms, that equals 1/200th of an inch, or 0.1 millimeter. Both the sensitivity (mickeys per inch) and speed (mickeys per second) of a computer mouse are measured this way by computer scientists.
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It's a factThe character was originally called Mortimer Mouse, which was changed at the behest of Lillian Disney, wife of Walt Disney. That name was reused for Mickey’s longtime rival, who first appeared in 1936.
Had the original name for the device stuck, it’s unlikely this measurement system would have come about. The mouse was briefly known as a “bug” when it was invented at the Stanford Research Institute to make computers more user-friendly, though that seems to have been a working title that no one was especially fond of. (That version of the device was also extremely primitive compared to the mice of today — it even had a wooden shell.) As for how the mouse got its current name, no one can quite remember, except that that’s what it looked like.
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The computer mouse was invented by ______.
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The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart.
A lot of people didn’t think the mouse would take off.
In perhaps one of the most infamous articles ever published about computers, the San Francisco Examiner’s John C. Dvorak wrote in 1984, “The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” Written as a review of Apple’s landmark personal computer, which had launched earlier that year, Dvorak’s not-so-prescient article wasn’t exactly a hot take at the time. The relatively small number of people who used computers regularly back then were just fine using the keyboard for everything, and Dvorak was hardly alone in asserting that he didn’t want to use a mouse. His predictive abilities didn’t seem to improve with time, alas, as he also wrote that Apple should “pull the plug” on the iPhone prior to its 2007 release.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
