Pointing Stick - History

History

In 1984, Ted Selker, a researcher at PARC, worked on a pointing stick based on a study that a typist needs a relatively long 0.75 sec to shift the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, and comparable time to shift back. Selker built a model of a device that would minimize this time. It was only three years later, working at IBM, that Selker refined his design, resulting in the TrackPoint product on which IBM received US patents in 1996.

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