The now ubiquitous mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, who built the first prototype, a bulky two-wheeled device, in 1964. Engelbart also coined the "mouse" nickname as a snappier alternative to its cumbersome official description as an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System." The modern single-ball, two-button mouse was largely developed by Jean-Daniel Nicoud at Switzerland�s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. With the release of the commercially successful Apple Macintosh in 1984 and the growing popularity of graphical interfaces such as Windows, the mouse became an indispensable tool for computer users.