I wonder if the mouse in that picture is a real prototype made by Jack McCauley in 1987 or a fake.
The picture is from Wikipedia. According to its metadata, the picture was taken in 2017. The Wikipedia user that uploaded it and which edited the Scroll Wheel article, as well as a lot on the article on Jack McCauley was
outed as a sock puppet not long after -- but the image and article text remains.
According to the Wikipedia article, the invention would have been done in 1987, two years before Daniel Venolia (now Gina Danielle Venolia) at Apple published a paper on her invention of a horizontal wheel at ACM SIGCHI in 1989.
However, according to a Jack McCauley's
profile on Crunchbase, in what looks like a cached copy of McCauley's profile on LinkedIn, his invention would have been done in 1992.
I have yet to find any third-party reference of McCauley's invention, only things that can be tracked back to McCauley himself. The Wikipedia article references a description of him as a speaker, likely told by himself.
(He sometimes uses the phrase "the first scrolling feature on a computer mouse", which is
a bit bold if you ask me, as there are lots of other ways to scroll using a mouse other than using a wheel.)
He says in
an interview by IGN that he built it and put it away.
Bah. This is confusing and I'm tired.
I expended too much in other hardware and the economy of my country is dying faster than I predicted. Maybe after the working season of the next month. Thanks for the offer anyway. If you still have it by February I'll talk to you.
