Jack McCauley, who is a founder at Oculus and claims to have invented the scroll wheel said in an interview with IGN that the ubiquitous feature is “not used in the way that I intended it to be used.” Jack McCauley said that he invented the scroll wheel to interact in new ways with the computers and move along the X and Y Axis. “It’s not used in the way that I intended it to be used…. I intended it to move forward into an application. So you can go X and Y with a cursor, but I wanted to go into it.” Jack McCauley thought that scroll wheels would do a nice job to get users to “go forward into an application.” We all know that scroll wheel is an important asset on the mouse, which makes every user scroll up and down a page. The scroll wheel also works as a key, clicking on the scroll wheel on some mice will open up new links in a new tab. You can try this now. However, it was never used the way creator envisioned. According to McCauley, he hoped that the scroll wheel will help users to move game characters forward and backward in the video game. Well, the Wikipedia page for scroll wheel shows many possible inventors and none of which are McCauley. The Wikipedia page also shows that scroll wheel became more popular in the mid 90’s when it was bundled with the Microsoft IntelliMouse which was the designed based on concepts from Eric Michelman. Eric Michelman’s goal was to get to places on an Excel page more quickly and adding a zoom lever to a mouse. However, scroll wheel was one of the significant components in any computing experience, and users enjoy this handy feature. So, what do you think about this? Share your views in the comment box below.
