1. First Trackball The very first input device to rely on hand motions to move a cursor was invented by the Royal Canadian Navy in 1952. It was an actual Canadian five-pin bowling ball mounted in some hardware that could track which way the ball was turned and then translate that information into on-screen motions. Since the whole project was a military secret, the design was never patented.

2. First Mouse The first piece of hardware that we’d probably identify as the ancestor of the modern mouse was developed in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart. It used two wheels mounted orthogonally to provide movement data in two axes, and just like a modern mouse, you held it in your hand.

3. First Trackball Mouse This is the 1968 Telefunken Rollkugel, from — where else? — Germany. It had a trackball underneath, along with a single button, and was used for drawing vector graphics.

4. First Optical Mouse Mice with mechanical moving parts were found to be somewhat unreliable, and by the late 1970s Xerox had come up with an improvement to the now common trackball with a mouse, called the Alto, that used LEDs and optical sensors. It required a special mousepad with a grid printed on it to work properly.

5. First Commercial Mouse In 1981 Xerox adapted its earlier Alto mouse into a controller for their 8010 system with a graphical user interface called Star. This was the first mouse to be available on the commercial market, although the cost at the time was $75,000 for just a basic 8010 system.

10. Haptic Mouse The mouse was originally designed for input, but it can provide feedback, too. The Novint Falcon uses motors in those three arms to shove your hand around, allowing you to “feel” objects on your screen.

7. First Wireless Mouse While Logitech had a wireless mouse that operated on infrared signals back in 1984, its 1991 Cordless MouseMan was the first to communicate with radio signals, which allowed the mouse to be placed out of line of sight of the receiver.

8. First Laser Mouse Logitech introduced the first consumer laser mouse in 2004 with the MX1000. Up until then, optical mice had relied on LEDs for surface illumination and tracking, and using a laser instead allowed mice to be much more responsive and resilient on many different kinds of surfaces.

9. Gyroscopic Mouse Air mice eschew the constraints of a two dimensional surface completely, and thanks to some accelerometers, you can just wave them around in midair and they’ll work just like a normal mouse. Pictured is the Logitech MX Air, which is likely the hands-down sexiest mouse of all time.

11. 3D Mouse Mice generally operate in two dimensions, but we live in a world with a few more than that, so some mice are designed to be able to manipulate things in different ways. This particular example comes from Axsotic, and incorporates six degrees of freedom: in addition to moving the ball in three axes, you can spin it around in three axes, too.

12. Hands-Free Mouse The mouse is all about converting physical gestures to movements on a computer screen, but we’re getting to the point where you don’t even need a physical piece of mousing hardware to make that happen. Microsoft’s Kinect system is just the first tentative little stab at this, and pretty soon we’ll have gesture capture system built into our laptops and even our cell phones.

13. Brain Controlled Mouse Hardware? Gestures? Too complicated. The future of the mouse is in pure brain control, and while the current generation of consumer mind-reading headsets aren’t quite capable of mouse control, there is a current generation of consumer mind-reading headsets, so brain controlled mice can’t be that far off.

6. First Consumer Mouse Apple decided to go with trackball technology in a mouse for its $10,000 Apple Lisa, released in 1983. The Lisa mouse had just a single button, along with a huge and heavy steel trackball. You can blame the next 20 years of Apple’s single button mice on this piece of hardware.