The first computer mouse had a wooden shell.

Engineer Douglas Engelbart and his colleague Bill English built the first prototype of the computer mouse in 1964 at the Stanford Research Institute. The device was a simple wooden shell housing two perpendicular wheels that tracked movement across a surface, with a single button on top and a cable trailing out the back that reportedly reminded people of a tail — hence the name.

Engelbart first showed it off publicly in 1968 during what’s now known as “the Mother of All Demos,” a presentation that also introduced hypertext, video conferencing, and collaborative editing years ahead of their time. The mouse itself didn’t reach mainstream consumers until it was adapted and popularized commercially in the 1980s.