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Billie, Logitech's billionth mouse, visits his design team in California. Photo, 2008, Logitech.

Menlo Park, California, USA (GenevaLunch) – Forty years ago today the first computer mouse made its appearance, a little brown box with a red eye at the front and a gray cord at the back, that someone – no one now remembers who – said looked like a mouse. The name stuck.

The mouse was the brainchild of Douglas Engelbart at SRI, Stanford Research Institute, and the coming out for the mouse was a demonstration to a group of 1,000 computer experts at a conference in California, 9 December 1968. Today, in California, the mousemakers are celebrating.

Douglas Engelbart‘s biography, put together as a PDF by Vaud-based Logitech, is a study in how dreaming can change the future of the world, but only with determination. Engelbart, early in his career, was almost hired by Hewlett-Packard, but when he remarked, after being offered the job, that he assumed they would be getting into computers the answer was no. Computers were a dubious field in the 1960s.

Logitech moved into the mouse field in 1982, when it made its first model, but it began marketing them under its own name only in 1985.

Today the company manufactures 94 million of them a year.

Among the other curious bits of mouse-related information:

• Logitech makes 94 million mice a year
• one billion computer mice, touching, would encircle the Earth three times
• Logitech mice that go through testing are clicked three to five million times before leaving the factory
• by comparison, there are about 795 million cars in the world
• also by comparision, six million people visit the Eiffel Tower every year, and it is expected to take another 100 years before it reaches the one billionth visitor mark.

The billionth mouse made by Logitech, the company that took Engelbart’s mouse model and gave it to the masses, was christened Billie. He left his birthplace in Suzhou, China 3 December on a world tour. He’s already passed through Sydney and is visiting California, home of his ancestors. Logitech publishes his travels as Billie’s Blog.

From mouse one to one billion, much has happened: a Logitech timeline of the mouse