Rainer Mallebrein

Rainer Mallebrein (* 1933 in Karlsruhe ) is a German electrical engineer who developed a trackball control similar to the computer mouse at Telefunken in the 1960s . Douglas Engelbart is usually considered the inventor of the mouse.

Mallebrein built his first television receiver at the age of 19. After graduating in 1957, he worked as a communications engineer at Pintsch Electro in Konstanz , which was taken over by Telefunken AG in 1958. In 1960 he developed one of the first video cameras with transistors. Since 1962 he has headed the data terminal equipment group for computer systems . At Telefunken, among other things, he dealt with bandwidth compression and storage of radar signals, television cameras, graphic data display devices for air traffic control and science, and developed a fully programmable alphanumeric terminal. From 1984 to 1994 he worked for the Hengstler company, where he developed a PC-based personal time recording and management system. He lives in Singen (Hohentwiel) .

The trackball control (as their version of the mouse was called by them) was originally developed as part of an order from the German Air Traffic Control (around 1965) to mark the positions of aircraft on radar screens. It was not used there (because a trackball was used there, as in the USA ), but as a peripheral device for the mainframe computer from Telefunken, the TR 440 , which was launched in 1969 . They published the idea in a Telefunken magazine two months (October 1) before Douglas Engelbart's (little noticed) presentation of a mouse at a conference on December 9, 1968. A patent application was also made, but the patent office saw too little inventive step . The movement of the ball was recorded by electronic rotary encoders and the technology was adopted from the trackball. Since only 46 copies of the TR 440 were built, and not all of them were equipped with trackball control (it cost 1500 DM at the time), trackball control is quite rare. A copy can be found in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum . The priority came to light through research by the science historian Ralf Bülow in 2009. The Xerox Alto (1973) had a mouse, but it only became popular in 1984 with the Apple Macintosh .

The Mallebrein team also developed a forerunner of the touch screen in 1970/71 , which they called the touch input device. To do this, they used a pane of glass with transparent conductor tracks in front of the actual screen.

Web links

• Susanne Ebner: Developer from Singen on the beginnings of the computer mouse: "We were ahead of our time" , interview with Mallebrein in Südkurier, January 24, 2018
• When the mouse rings twice , HNF Blog, October 4, 2016
• Oral History Interview by Mallebrein , Computer History Museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Martin Holland: "Trackball": Inventor gives very first PC mouse to Paderborn . In: Heise online from May 14, 2019.