Scroll wheel

A scroll wheel is a wheel used for scrolling on an electronic visual display. The term usually refers to a wheel found on a computer mouse, in which case it is also called a mouse wheel. It is often made of hard plastic with a rubbery surface, centred around an internal rotary encoder. It is usually located between the left and right mouse buttons and is positioned perpendicular to the mouse surface. Sometimes the wheel can be pressed to provide additional input, in effect functioning as an additional mouse button.

A scroll wheel is a wheel used for scrolling on an electronic visual display. The term usually refers to a wheel found on a computer mouse, in which case it is also called a mouse wheel. It is often made of hard plastic with a rubbery surface, centred around an internal rotary encoder. It is usually located between the left and right mouse buttons and is positioned perpendicular to the mouse surface. Sometimes the wheel can be pressed to provide additional input, in effect functioning as an additional mouse button. == History == The scroll wheel on a mouse has been invented multiple times by different people unaware of the others' work. Other scrolling controls on a mouse, and the use of a wheel for scrolling both precede the combination of wheel and mouse. The earliest known example of the former is the Mighty Mouse prototype developed jointly by NTT, Japan and ETH Zürich, Switzerland (Kunio Ōno, Ken'ichi Fukaya and Jürg Nievergelt) in 1985. It had a thumb-operated combined analog button/toggle switch on the side for smooth scrolling. At the ACM SIGCHI conference in 1989, Gina Danielle Venolia from Apple presented a mouse prototype with a horizontal thumb-wheel for scrolling, or for navigating inwards and outwards: zooming or along the third axis in 3D space. In her patent application from 1992 there are two vertical wheels: left and right of the button(s). In 1995, the Taiwanese company KYE Systems released the first commercial mouse with scroll wheel. It was named Genius EasyScroll and was also available as Mouse Systems ProAgio. The scroll wheel was popularized by the Microsoft IntelliMouse in 1996 along with support for the mouse wheel in Microsoft Office 97. It had been based on ideas developed by Eric Michelman since 1993 with input from Chris Graham. Scroll wheels can also be found on PDAs and mobiles phones such as early Sony models, BlackBerry devices and Nokia 7110, which usually have the function of navigating through menus. They have also appeared on keyboards, particularly on Logitech and Microsoft models, usually located to the left of the caps lock key. ==See also== Scroll lock

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