The Evolution Of Technology In GIF Form Shows Just How Much Our Devices Have Changed

Dogs On Computers — Remember these bulky computer monitors? Reuters

If you're reading this, chances are you have used a mouse, laptop or a traditional desktop computer with an LCD display. It's easy to see how much technology has changed over the past decade, but it's more startling to see just how far we've come since the mouse made its debut in 1963.

The first mouse was a simple block of wood, a rolling wheel, a wire and a single button. Designed by Stanford Research Institute engineer Doug Engelbart, the mouse was first conceived during a conference in 1961. Engelbart wanted to create something that would improve the efficiency of interactive computing and introduced it to the public in 1968.

"We set up our experiments, and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before. It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I'm surprised the name stuck," Engelbart said of testing the various pointing methods during the development of the mouse in a 2004 interview with Wired.

Cat Using Computer — The first mouse prototype was developed in 1963. Reuters

Engelbart's presentation has been dubbed the "mother of all demos," due to the many pieces of technology that were introduced that now have become part of our everyday life. During the 1968 presentation, Engelbart unveiled the mouse and early versions of graphics, command input, video conferencing, a file-linking system, word processing and windows. The Atlantic said the presentation started the "personal computing revolution" in its retrospective looking at the 45th anniversary of the event.

While the computer mouse has had 50 years to change, other technologies have made incredible advancements in a much shorter time frame. Relics from the late 1980s to mid-1990s were bulky and expensive, and the first laptop barely passes as a portable computer these days. Storage has gone from 1.2 megabytes stored on a 5.25-inch floppy disk to SD cards that can store up to 516 MB.

You can view the evolution of the mouse, laptop, storage and Macs below.

Computer Mouse