History
During a 1968 presentation by Douglas Engelbart marking the public debut of a mouse, Engelbart used a control console designed by Jack Kelley of Herman Miller that included a keyboard and an inset portion used as a support area for the mouse. According to Kelley and also stated by Alex Pang, Kelley designed the first mousepad a year later, in 1969.
Details of a mousepad designed by Armando M. Fernandez were published in the Xerox Disclosure Journal in 1979 with the description:
CRT CURSER CONTROL MECHANISM PADTo assist the operation of a cathode ray tube pointer 10 wherein a metal ball is rolled on a hard surface, the disclosed pad may be utilized. A resilient, rubber-like material 12 is bonded or otherwise attached to a hard base material 14 which keeps the rubber-like material flat. The base has four rubber-like pads 16 on the opposite side from the resilient material to refrain the pad from sliding on the surface of a table, for instance. —Xerox Disclosure Journal, Volume 4, Number 6, November/December 1979
By 1982, most users of the Xerox ball mouse were using "special pads" to increase the friction of the ball.
The Oxford English Dictionary tracks the term mouse pad to the 25 August 1983, publication of InfoWorld, and the predominantly British term mousemat to 17 October 1989, in the publication 3D.
Read more about this topic: Mousepad
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