20 Years Ago, Microsoft Changed How We Mouse Forever

On top it didn’t look much different than its predecessors—it still had a few buttons and a scroll wheel—but underneath it introduced a technology to the masses that brought an end to the prehistoric days of cleaning dirt and grime out of computer mice. All that changed on April 14, 1999, when at the COMDEX expo in Las Vegas, a now-defunct trade show similar to today’s CES, Microsoft announced its IntelliMouse Explorer: a mouse that traded the dirt sucking rolling ball for LEDs and a digital camera that could optically track the mouse’s movements with extreme precision. Microsoft was far from the first company to incorporate optical tracking into a mouse.

Source: gizmodo.com