“Eric Michelman wired a joystick to the zoom setting in Excel to make it easier to navigate large spreadsheets. He called it the ZoomLever. He demoed it at one of our team meetings and asked if anyone had any ideas for what we could use instead of the joystick. I had just bought a new VCR that had a remote with a wheel on it, and I brought it in the next day to show him. Eric asked if he could borrow it, showed it to the hardware guys, and soon we were playing with IntelliMouse prototypes with wheels on them.”

So this is how the mouse wheel came about.