> The Mouse: The little rectangular object with three buttons that usually sits to the right of the keyboard is called a mouse. Move it around while watching the screen. An arrow (mouse cursor) will be moving in response to it. This is how we point to objects on the screen.
> Graphical input. The user is provided with a "mouse," a coordinate input device with three pushbuttons. The mouse rolls along a table top and is tracked by a cursor that moves on the screen. The mouse can thus be used to point to objects already displayed on the screen, or simply to identify a coordinate position.
> The state of mouse input is reflected by the cursor tracked by the mouse as it is moved. Usually, the cursor is an arrow pointing to the pixel at the mouse’s location. A program may change the cursor to reflect its state.
> If the mouse button is depressed while the mouse cursor is inside the circle, left-and-right and up-and-down movement of the mouse will rotate the object left-and right and up-and-down on the screen.
> For example, once you have moved the mouse cursor over a small target that is to be dragged, you do not want the act of switching to mouse dragging mode to move the cursor off of the target .
A cursor is a small image that appears on the screen and is controlled by the mouse. (It appears only on the screen, and never in an off-screen bit image.)
Other Macintosh documentation calls this image a "pointer", since it points to a location on the screen. To avoid confusion with other meanings of "pointer" in this manual and other Toolbox documentation, we use the alternate term "cursor".
Smalltalk-72 manual (1976), page 2 - http://mame.myds.me/bitsavers/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/Sma... :
> The Mouse: The little rectangular object with three buttons that usually sits to the right of the keyboard is called a mouse. Move it around while watching the screen. An arrow (mouse cursor) will be moving in response to it. This is how we point to objects on the screen.
Raster Graphics for Interactive Programming Environments (1979) - http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xer...
> Graphical input. The user is provided with a "mouse," a coordinate input device with three pushbuttons. The mouse rolls along a table top and is tracked by a cursor that moves on the screen. The mouse can thus be used to point to objects already displayed on the screen, or simply to identify a coordinate position.
The Blit: A Multiplexed Graphics Terminal ("Sometime in 1983", by Rob Pike) - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.611...
> The state of mouse input is reflected by the cursor tracked by the mouse as it is moved. Usually, the cursor is an arrow pointing to the pixel at the mouse’s location. A program may change the cursor to reflect its state.
A Study in Interactive 3-D Rotation Using 2-D Control Devices" (1990) - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/asellen/public...
> If the mouse button is depressed while the mouse cursor is inside the circle, left-and-right and up-and-down movement of the mouse will rotate the object left-and right and up-and-down on the screen.
Fluid DTMouse: Better Mouse Support for Touch-Based Interactions (2006) - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.416...
> For example, once you have moved the mouse cursor over a small target that is to be dragged, you do not want the act of switching to mouse dragging mode to move the cursor off of the target .