History
The scroll wheel was invented at Microsoft in 1993 by Eric Michelman. The first example of a scrolling mouse is the Genius EasyScroll mouse made by Taiwanese company KYE Systems in 1995, but it was popularized by the Microsoft IntelliMouse in 1996 along with support for the mouse wheel in Microsoft Office 97. It is notably one of the first additions to the basic two-button mouse design used for PCs that became a de facto standard. Its popularity increased with the proliferation of the World Wide Web, where efficient mouse-only scrolling is most useful.
In the 21st century, scroll wheels started appearing on keyboards as well, particularly on Logitech and Microsoft models. It is usually located to the left of the caps lock key. The implementation of scroll wheels on laptop computers has generally faded, while touchpads are often made with the edges acting to scroll the page (rather than to move the pointer), partly making up for the lack of a scroll wheel. On laptops with multitouch capability, scrolling is usually achieved by touching and dragging two fingers on the touchpad at the same time. Many Linux distributions offer a third method of scrolling using the touchpad, where the user will first activate scroll-mode by pressing in a corner of the pad, and than dragging in a circle around the center of the pad, letting go of the touchpad will switch back to the default mouse-mode.
In 1985 NTT, Japan and ETH, Switzerland (Ohno, Fukaya & Nievergeld) jointly developed the first scrolling mouse called the "Mighty Mouse". That had the scroll wheel accessible on the side. Somewhere between 1989 - 1993 Dan Venolia of Apple develops a mouse with a thumb-wheel accessible on the side. And is filed in 1992 as U.S. Patent 5,313,230. In 1995, Mouse Systems releases ProAgio, the first commercial mouse with a scroll wheel but few people notice. In 1997 Microsoft files the U.S. Patent 5,912,661 for a mouse with a combined button and scroll wheel.
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