'The only computer with a mouse that was commercially successful was the Macintosh,' Henry Lowood, a curator for History & Science Technology Collections at Stanford University, tells CNBC Make It. (That's about $6,122 in today's dollars.) It fared better, and its popularity was a milestone for the mouse. While the Lisa did not sell well, Apple next released the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, which cost $2,500. 'As the mouse moves, the cursor - the arrow that points to particular places on the screen - moves accordingly.' 'Instead of typing instructions, one points to pictures on the screen by sliding a handheld device called a mouse along the top of the desk next to the computer,' an article about the Lisa computer explained in 1983. It was so revolutionary in the world of personal computing that The New York Times reported on it. It sold for $10,000 a piece - over $25,000 today with inflation. It was the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse, Wired reports, and it took $150 million to develop. In 1983, Apple released the Lisa computer. 'A few days after his second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial design firm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple single button model that cost $15.'Īnd in line with his famous attention to user experience and detail, Jobs wanted to be able to use it on any surface - '.on Formica and my blue jeans,' Jobs demanded, according to Isaacson. 'The Xerox mouse had three buttons, was complicated, cost $300 apiece, and didn't roll around smoothly,' Isaacson writes in the biography. But he wanted the gadget to be more efficient.

Jobs was intrigued by the graphics technology at Xerox, and the mouse. The mouse was part of Xerox's work to create a more intuitive graphical user interface for computers, so users could click, point and scrolling through visual elements onscreen like drop down menus, tabs and icons. Jobs first encountered the mouse there in 1979, when Xerox allowed him and his team from Apple to look at the new technologies being developed in exchange for giving Xerox the chance to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at $10 apiece, Walter Isaacson writes in ' Steve Jobs.' (Apple went public the following year with a split-adjusted IPO price of $2.75 per share, according to Fortune.) The mouse was first patented by Douglas Engelbart in 1967, and was described as an 'X-Y position indicator for a display system.' It was then further developed at Xerox PARC, which stands for Palo Alto Research Center. In the mid-1980s, the idea of using a computer mouse to click around - instead of typing text commands - was still nascent.

1967 patent sketch by Douglas Engelbart courtesy of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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