The mouse predates the Star by quite a bit. It was first demo'd
by Douglas Engelbar in 1968 ( nice little essay can be found
at http://www.salon.com/bc/1998/12/15bc2.html ).
As for Apple and Xerox, on page 341 of _Just_Java_ by Peter van der
Linden there is an interesting piece call "Did Apple Copy Xerox?"
The gist of it is that Jef Raskin started the Mac project at Apple
in 1979, long before Steve Jobs visited PARC.
"Paul M. Foster" wrote:
>
> The mouse was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), along
> with the Star computer. I don't know the OS it ran. Xerox wasn't really
> very savvy about marketing and such, and saw this mostly as a curiosity.
> And although the developers were loath to share their work with anyone,
> the suits at Xerox told them to show it to the folks at Apple. Who
> originated this (Apple or Xerox) I don't know. Later, Microsoft was
> shipped a Lisa or early Mac (don't recall which) in order to build
> software to run on the Mac (again, don't know if this was Microsoft's or
> Apple's origination). From there, Microsoft began to develop Windows.
> Where the mouse was originally used for X Windows I don't know, but I
> suspect there were close ties between academia and PARC, so it may have
> just crossed over that way. Or it may have gone from Apple/Microsoft into
> the Unix world. Oddly enough, the Mac has always had a one button mouse,
> and Microsoft has always used a two button mouse, whereas X seems to
> prefer a three button mouse.
>
> Wish I could be more specific on some of these points. This is from
> memory. There are a variety of books out there that detail different
> pieces of these events.
>
> Paul M. Foster
>
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