title: Ezra Pound

text: Immediately after the meeting Pound began writing "The ABC of Economics" and "Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L'Idea Statale Fascism as I Have Seen It" (1935). The latter was ready by the end of February, although he had trouble finding a publisher. In 1942 Pound told Italy's Royal Finance Office that he had written the book for propaganda purposes in Italy's interests. He wrote articles praising Mussolini and fascism for T. S. Eliot's "The Criterion" in July 1933, the "New York World Telegram" in November 1933, the "Chicago Tribune" on 9 April 1934, and in 65 articles for the "British-Italian Bulletin", published by the Italian Embassy in London.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's antisemitism deepened with the introduction in Italy of the racial laws in 1938, preceded by the publication in July that year of the Manifesto of Race. Mussolini instituted restrictions against Jews, who had to register. Foreign Jews lost their Italian citizenship, and on 18 September 1938 Mussolini declared Judaism "an irreconcilable enemy of fascism".


title: Ezra Pound

text: When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Ezra to organize the funeral, where he saw their 12-year-old son, Omar, for the first time in eight years. He visited Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who produced a famous portrait of Pound reclining.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Believing he could stop America's involvement in World War II, Pound sailed for New York in April 1939 on the SS "Rex" in a first-class suite. Giving interviews on the deck in a tweed jacket, he told reporters that Mussolini wanted peace. In Washington, D.C. he attended a session of Congress, sitting in a section of the gallery reserved for relatives (because of Thaddeus Coleman Pound). He lobbied senators and congressmen, had lunch with the Polish ambassador, warning him not to trust the English or Winston Churchill, and asked to see the President but was told it could not be done.


title: Ezra Pound

text: He took part in a poetry reading at Harvard, where he agreed to be recorded by the Department of Speech, and in July he received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College, along with the radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn, whom Pound referred to at the time as Kaltenstein, gave an anti-fascist speech after lunch ("dictatorships shall die, but democracies shall live"), which Pound interrupted loudly to the point where, according to one account, the college president had to intervene. Pound described this years later to Wyndham Lewis: "That was a music hall day, with a stage set/ only at a Kawledg Komencement wd/ one git in mouth-shot at that sort of wind-bag/ that fahrt Kaltenbourne." Pound sailed back to Italy a few days later on the SS "Conte di Savoia".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Between May and September 1939 Pound wrote 12 articles for the "Japan Times" (he became their "Italian correspondent"), which included the claim that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews'". He discussed the "essential fairness of Hitler's war aims" and wrote that Churchill was a senile front for the Rothschilds.


title: Ezra Pound

text: When war broke out in September 1939, Pound began a letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned months earlier. On 18 June 1940, after the fall of France, he wrote to Senator Burton K. Wheeler: "I have read a regulation that only those foreigners are to be admitted to the U.S. who are deemed to be useful etc/. The dirtiest jews from Paris, Blum??" He explained that they were all a pox. To his publisher, James Laughlin, he wrote that "Roosevelt represents Jewry" and signed off with "Heil Hitler". He began calling Roosevelt "Jewsfeldt" or "Stinky Rooosenstein". In "Meridiano di Roma" he compared Hitler and Mussolini to Confucius. In Oswald Mosley's newspaper, "Action", he wrote that the English were "a slave race governed by the House of Rothschild since Waterloo". By May 1940, according to the historian Matthew Feldman, the British government regarded Pound as "a principal supplier of information to the BUF <nowiki>[</nowiki>British Union of Fascists<nowiki>]</nowiki> from abroad". His literary agent in New York, John J. Slocum, urged him to return to writing poetry and literary criticism; instead, Pound sent Slocum political manifestos, which he declined to attempt to publish in the United States.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Between 23 January 1941 and 28 March 1945, including during the Holocaust in Italy, Pound recorded or composed hundreds of broadcasts for Italian radio, mostly for EIAR (Radio Rome) and later for a radio station in the Salò Republic, the Nazi puppet state in northern and central Italy. Broadcast in English, and sometimes in Italian, German, and French, the EIAR program was transmitted to England, central Europe, and the United States.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Styling himself "Dr Ezra Pound" (his only doctorate was the honorary one from Hamilton College), he attacked the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt's family, Churchill, and the Jews. He praised Hitler, recommended eugenics to "conserve the best of the race", and referred to Jews as "filth". The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, and on 26 July 1943 the United States District Court for the District of Columbia indicted Pound "in absentia" for treason. According to Feldman, the Pound archives at Yale contain receipts for 195 payments from the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture from 22 April 1941 to 26 January 1944. Over 33 months, Pound received 250,000 lire (then equivalent to $12,500; $185,000 as of 2013).


title: Ezra Pound

text: On 9–10 September 1943, the German Wehrmacht occupied northern and central Italy. Hitler appointed Mussolini head of a fascist puppet state, the Italian Social Republic or Salò Republic. Pound called it the "Republic of Utopia". SS officers began concentrating Jews in transit camps before deporting them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the first group of 1,034 Jews to arrive in Auschwitz from Rome on 23 October 1943 839 were gassed.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In Rome when the German occupation began, Pound headed north to Gais, on foot and by train, to visit his daughter, a journey of about . On or around 23 November 1943, he met Fernando Mezzasoma, the new Minister of Popular Culture, in Salò. Pound wrote to Dorothy from Salò asking if she could obtain a radio confiscated from the Jews to give to Rudge, so that Rudge could help with his work.


title: Ezra Pound

text: From 1 December 1943 Pound began writing scripts for the state's new radio station. The following day he suggested to Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of the Republican Fascist Party, that book stores be legally obliged to showcase certain books, including "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (1903), a hoax document purporting to be a Jewish plan to dominate the world. "The arrest of Jews will create a wave of useless mercy," Pound wrote, "thus the need to disseminate the Protocols. The intellectuals are capable of a passion more durable than emotional, but they need to understand the reasons for a conflict." On 26 January 1945, in a script called "Corpses of Course" for the program "Jerry's Front Calling", Pound wrote: "Why shouldn't there be one grand beano; wiping out Sieff and Kuhn and Loeb and Guggenheim and Stinkenfinger and the rest of the nazal bleaters?"


title: Ezra Pound

text: In May 1944 the German military, trying to secure the coast against the Allies, forced the Pounds to evacuate their seafront apartment in Rapallo. From then until the end of the war, the couple lived with Rudge in her home above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio. There were food shortages, no coffee, and no newspapers, telephones, or letters. According to Rudge, Ezra and Dorothy would spend their nights listening to the BBC. In addition to the radio scripts, Pound was writing for the newspaper "Il Popolo di Alessandria". He wanted to write for the more reputable "Corriere della Sera" in Milan, but the editor regarded his Italian as "incomprehensible".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot by Italian partisans on 28 April 1945. Their bodies were displayed in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, abused by the crowd, then left hanging upside down. "Thus Ben and la Clara "a Milano" / by the heels at Milano". On 3 May armed partisans arrived at Rudge's home to find Pound alone. He picked up the Confucian text "Four Books" and a Chinese–English dictionary and was taken to their headquarters in Zoagli, then at his request to the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by FBI agent Frank L. Amprin.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to help negotiate a "just peace" with Japan. He wanted to make a final broadcast called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he would recommend not only peace with Japan, but American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover. A few days later Amprin removed over 7,000 letters, articles and other documents from Rudge's home as evidence. On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, Pound gave the Americans a further statement:


title: Ezra Pound

text: I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day's work for a living. Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the "mess" that Italy gets into by bumping off Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Later that day he told an American reporter, Edd Johnson, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc ... Like many martyrs, he held extreme views". Mussolini was "a very human, imperfect character who lost his head". On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's outdoor steel cages, with tar paper covers, lit up at night by floodlights. Engineers reinforced his cage the night before he arrived in case fascist sympathizers tried to break him out.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound lived in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, apart from daily access to the chaplain. After three weeks, he stopped eating. He recorded what seemed to be a breakdown in "Canto LXXX", where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, after which he was transferred to his own tent. He began to write, drafting what became known as "The Pisan Cantos". The existence of two sheets of toilet paper showing the first ten lines of "Canto LXXIV" in pencil suggests he started it while in the cage.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound arrived back in Washington, D.C. on 18 November 1945, two days before the start of the Nuremberg trials. Lt. Col. P. V. Holder, one of the escorting officers, wrote in an affidavit that Pound was "an intellectual 'crackpot'" who intended to conduct his own defense. Dorothy would not allow it; Pound wrote in a letter: "Tell Omar I favour a defender who has written a life of J. Adams and translated Confucius. Otherwise how CAN he know what it is about?"


title: Ezra Pound

text: He was arraigned on 27 November on charges of treason, and on 4 December he was placed in a locked room in the psychiatric ward of Gallinger Hospital. Three court-appointed psychiatrists, including Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, decided that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. They found him "abnormally grandiose ... expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness and distractibility." A fourth psychiatrist appointed by Pound's lawyer initially thought he was a psychopath, which would have made him fit to stand trial.


title: Ezra Pound

text: On 21 December 1945, as case no. 58,102, he was transferred to Howard Hall, St. Elizabeths' maximum security ward, where he was held in a single cell with peepholes. Visitors were admitted to the waiting room for 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming. A hearing on 13 February 1946 concluded that he was of "unsound mind"; he shouted in court: "I never did believe in Fascism, God damn it; I am opposed to Fascism." Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, requested his release at a hearing in January 1947. As a compromise, Overholser moved him to the more comfortable Cedar Ward on the third floor of the east wing of St. Elizabeths' Center Building. In early 1948 he was moved again, this time to a larger room in Chestnut Ward.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. At last provided for, he was allowed to read, write, and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day. (In October 1946 Dorothy had been placed in charge of his "person and property".) His room had a typewriter, floor-to-ceiling book shelves, and bits of paper hanging on string from the ceiling with ideas for "The Cantos". He had turned a small alcove on the ward into his living room, where he entertained friends and literary figures. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released.


title: Ezra Pound

text: James Laughlin of New Directions had Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV, known as "The Pisan Cantos", ready for publication in 1946 and gave Pound an advance copy, but Laughlin held back, waiting for the right time to publish. A group of Pound's friends—T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell—met Laughlin in June 1948 to discuss how to get Pound released. They planned to have him awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published "The Pisan Cantos" on 20 July 1948, and the following February the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro; the latter said he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself. Pound had apparently prepared a statement—"No comment from the Bug House"—but decided instead to stay silent.


title: Ezra Pound

text: There was uproar. The "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" quoted critics who said that poetry cannot "convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry". Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in "The Saturday Review of Literature", telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire, not one line, in Pound". Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee. It was the last time the Library of Congress administered the prize.


title: Ezra Pound

text: During a case conference at St. Elizabeths on 28 January 1946, six psychiatrists had concluded that Pound had psychopathic personality disorder but was not psychotic. Present during the meeting, he decided to lie on the floor while the psychiatrists interviewed him. In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association published its first "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-1), and St. Elizabeths began diagnosing patients according to its definitions. In July 1953 a psychiatrist added to Pound's notes that he probably had narcissistic personality disorder. The main feature of Pound's personality, he wrote, was his "profound, incredible, over-weaning "(sic)" narcissism". A personality disorder, unlike conditions that give rise to psychosis, is not regarded as a mental illness, and the diagnosis would have made Pound fit to stand trial. On 31 May 1955, at the request of the hospital's superintendent Winfred Overholser, the diagnosis was changed to "psychotic disorder, undifferentiated", which is classified as mental illness. In 1966, after his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.


title: Ezra Pound

text: While in St. Elizabeths, Pound would often decline to talk to psychiatrists with names he deemed Jewish (he called psychiatrists "kikiatrists"), and he apparently told Charles Olson: "I was a Zionist in Italy, but now I'm for pogroms, after what I've experienced in here (SLiz)." He advised visitors to read the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and he referred to any visitor he happened not to like as Jewish. In November 1953 he wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti that Hitler was "bit by dirty Jew mania for World Domination, as yu used to point out/ this WORST of German diseases was got from yr/ idiolized and filthy biblical bastards. Adolf clear on the baccilus of kikism/ that is on nearly all the other poisons.[sic] but failed to get a vaccine against that."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound struck up a friendship with Eustace Mullins, apparently associated with the Aryan League of America and author of the 1961 biography "This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound". Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member who, after "Brown v. Board of Education" (a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating racial desegregation in public schools), set up a Citizens' Council chapter, the Seaboard White Citizens' Council in Washington. Members had to be white, supportive of racial segregation, and believers in the divinity of Jesus. Kasper wrote to Pound after admiring him at university, and the two became friends. In 1953 Kasper opened a far-right bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, that displayed Pound's work in the window. With Pound's cooperation, he and another Pound admirer, T. David Horton, set up Square Dollar Series, a publishing imprint that reprinted Pound's books and others he approved of.


title: Ezra Pound

text: It became increasingly clear that Pound was schooling Kasper in the latter's pro-segregation activism. In January and February 1957 the "New York Herald Tribune" ran a series of articles on their relationship, after which the FBI began photographing Pound's visitors. One article alleged that some of Kasper's pamphlets had, as John Tytell put it, "a distinctly Poundian ring" to them. Kasper was jailed in 1956 over a speech he made in Clinton, Tennessee, and he was questioned about the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville. After Pound left hospital in 1958, the men kept in touch; he wrote to Kasper on 17 April 1959: "Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don't play it. ... They RELY ON YOUR PLAYING IT."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Between late 1955 and early 1957, Pound wrote at least 80 unsigned or pseudonymous articles—"often ugly", Swift notes—for the "New Times" of Melbourne, a newspaper connected to the social-credit movement. Noel Stock, one of Pound's correspondents and early biographers, worked for the paper and published Pound's articles there. A 24-year-old radio reporter at the time, Stock first wrote to Pound in hospital after reading "The Pisan Cantos".


title: Ezra Pound

text: In the "New Times" in April 1956, Pound wrote: "Our Victorian forebears would have been greatly scandalized at the idea that one might not be free to study inherited racial characteristics," and "Some races are retentive, mainly of the least desirable bits of their barbaric past." There was a "Jewish-Communist plot", which he compared to syphilis. Equality was dismissed as "anti-biological nonsense". "There were no gas ovens in Italy", he wrote in April 1956; a month later he referred to the "fuss about Hitler". On 10 August 1956: "It is perfectly well known that the fuss about 'de-segregation' in the United States has been started by Jews." Instead, America needed "race pride". Using pseudonyms, he sent his articles directly to Stock, so that the newspaper's editor may not have realized they had all been written by Pound. Stock sent Pound copies of the published articles, which he would distribute to his followers. He contributed similar material to other publications, including "Edge", which Stock founded in October 1956. Stock called "Edge" the magazine of the "international Poundian underground".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound's friends continued to try to get him out of St. Elizabeths. In 1948, in an effort to present his radio broadcasts as harmless, Olga Rudge self-published six of them (on cultural topics only) as "If This Be Treason". She visited him twice, in 1952 and 1955, but could not convince him to be more assertive about his release. In 1950 she had written to Hemingway to complain that Pound's friends had not done enough. Hemingway and Rudge did not like each other. He told Dorothy in 1951 that "the person who makes least sense ...in all this is Olga Rudge". In what John Cohassey called a "controlled, teeth-gritting response", Hemingway replied to Rudge that he would pardon Pound if he could, but that Pound had "made the rather serious mistake of being a traitor to his country, and temporarily he must lie in the bed he made". He ended by saying "To be even more blunt, I have always loved Dorothy, and still do."


title: Ezra Pound

text: Four years later, shortly after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, Hemingway told "Time" magazine ..."I believe this would be a good year to release poets." The poet Archibald MacLeish asked him in June 1957 to write a letter on Pound's behalf. Hemingway believed Pound would not stop making inappropriate statements and friendships, but he signed MacLeish's letter anyway and pledged $1,500 to be handed to Pound upon his release. In an interview for the "Paris Review" in early 1958, Hemingway said that Pound should be released and Kasper jailed.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Several publications began campaigning in 1957. "Le Figaro" published an appeal titled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths". "The New Republic", "Esquire", and "The Nation" followed suit. "The Nation" argued that Pound was a "sick and vicious old man", but that he had rights. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit stating Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose. The motion was heard on 18 April 1958 by Chief Judge Bolitha Laws, who had committed Pound to St. Elizabeths in 1945. The Justice Department did not oppose the motion, and Pound was discharged on 7 May.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound and Dorothy arrived in Naples on the on 9 July 1958, where Pound was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press. When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum." They were accompanied by a young teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, ostensibly acting as his secretary. Disembarking at Genoa, the group arrived three days later at Schloss Brunnenburg, near Merano in South Tyrol, to live with Mary, where Pound met his grandchildren for the first time. Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Spann was seen off, sent back to the United States in October 1959.


title: Ezra Pound

text: By December 1959 Pound was mired in depression. According to the writer Michael Reck, who visited him several times at St. Elizabeths, Pound was a changed man; he said little and called his work "worthless". In a 1960 interview in Rome with Donald Hall for "Paris Review", he said: "You—find me—in fragments." He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life".


title: Ezra Pound

text: Those close to him thought he had dementia, and in mid-1960 he spent time in a clinic when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary tract infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga Rudge, first in Rapallo then in Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. In 1961 Pound attended a meeting in Rome in honor of Oswald Mosley, who was visiting Italy. His health continued to decline, and his friends were dying: Wyndham Lewis in 1957, Ernest Hemingway in 1961 (Hemingway shot himself), E. E. Cummings in 1962, William Carlos Williams in 1963, and T. S. Eliot in 1965. In 1963 he told an interviewer, Grazia Livi: "I spoil everything I touch. ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning." He attended Eliot's funeral in London and visited W. B. Yeats' widow in Dublin (Yeats died in 1939).


title: Ezra Pound

text: In 1966 he was admitted to the Genoa School of Medicine's psychiatric hospital for an evaluation after prostate surgery. His notes said he had psychomotor retardation, insomnia, depression, and he believed he had been "contaminated by microbes". According to a psychiatrist who treated him, Pound had previously been treated with electroconvulsive therapy. This time he was given imipramine and responded well. The doctors diagnosed bipolar disorder. Two years later he attended the opening of an exhibition in New York featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's "The Waste Land". He went on to Hamilton College and received a standing ovation.


title: Ezra Pound

text: In the restaurant of the Pensione Cici in Venice in 1967, Pound told Allen Ginsberg, Michael Reck, and Peter Russell that his poems were "a lot of double talk" and made no sense, and that his writing was "a mess", "stupid and ignorant all the way through". Reck wrote about the meeting in "Evergreen Review" the following year. "At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron," Pound reportedly said. He "looked very morose" and barely spoke: "There is nothing harder than conversing with Pound nowadays," Reck wrote.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Pound offered a carefully worded rejection of his antisemitism, according to Reck. When Ginsberg reassured Pound that he had "shown us the way", he is said to have replied: "Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things." Reck continued: "Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.'"


title: Ezra Pound

text: Shortly before his death in 1972, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences committee, which included his publisher James Laughlin, proposed that Pound be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal. After a storm of protest, the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9. In the foreword of a Faber & Faber volume of his prose, he wrote in July: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE."


title: Ezra Pound

text: On his 87th birthday, on 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the San Giovanni e Paolo Civil Hospital in Venice, where he died in his sleep on 1 November of "sudden blockage of the intestine". Alerted by telegram, Dorothy Pound, who was living in a care home near Cambridge, England, requested a Protestant funeral in Venice. Telegrams were sent via American embassies in Rome and London, and the consulate in Milan, but Rudge would not change the plans she had already made for the morning of 3 November. Omar Pound flew to Venice as soon as he could, with Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber, but he arrived too late. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed Pound's body to Venice's municipal cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where, after a Protestant service, he was buried, near Diaghilev and Stravinsky, with other non-Italian Christians. According to Hugh Kenner, Pound had wanted to be buried in Idaho with his bust by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on his grave. Dorothy Pound died in England the following year, aged 87. Olga Rudge died in 1996, aged 100, and was buried next to Pound.


title: Ezra Pound

text: After the Bollingen Prize in 1949, Pound's friends made every effort to rehabilitate him. James Laughlin's New Directions Publishing published his "Selected Poems", with an introduction by Eliot, and a censored selection of "The Cantos". Ralph Fletcher Seymour published "Patria Mia" (written around 1912) to show that Pound was an American patriot. In advertisements, magazine articles, and critical introductions, Pound's friends and publishers attributed his antisemitism and fascism to mental illness.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Literary scholar Betsy Erkkila writes that no one was more important to Pound's rehabilitation than Hugh Kenner, who was introduced to Pound by Marshall McLuhan in St. Elizabeths in May 1948, when Kenner was 25. Kenner's "The Poetry of Ezra Pound" (1951) adopted a New Critical approach, where all that mattered was the work itself.


title: Ezra Pound

text: New Directions and Faber & Faber published "Ezra Pound: Translations" in 1953, introduced by Kenner, and the following year "Literary Essays of Ezra Pound", introduced by Eliot. The first PhD dissertation on Pound was completed in 1948, and by 1970 there were around ten a year. Kenner's "The Pound Era" (1971), which overlooked the fascism, antisemitism, World War II, treason, and the Bollingen Award, effectively equated Pound with modernism. Pound scholar Leon Surette argued that Kenner's approach was hagiographic. He included in this approach Caroll F. Terrell's "Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship", founded in 1972 and edited by Kenner and Eva Hesse, and Terrell's two-volume "A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound" (1980–1984). In 1971 Terrell founded the National Poetry Foundation to focus on Pound, and organized conferences on Pound in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Following Eustace Mullins' biography, "This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound" (1961), was "Life of Ezra Pound" (1970) by Noel Stock. A former reporter, Stock was one of the publishers of Pound's newspaper articles in the 1950s, including his antisemitism. Ronald Bush's "The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos" (1976) became the first critical study of "The Cantos". Several significant biographies appeared in the 1980s: J. J. Wilhelm's three-volume work (1985–1994), beginning with "The American Roots of Ezra Pound"; John Tytell's "Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano" (1987); and Humphrey Carpenter's 1005-page "A Serious Character" (1988). A. David Moody's three-volume "Ezra Pound: Poet" (2007–2015) combines biography with literary criticism.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Studies that examine Pound's relationships with the far right include Robert Casillo's "The Genealogy of Demons" (1988); Tim Redman's "Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism" (1999); Leon Surette's "Pound in Purgatory" (1999); Matthew Feldman's "Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45" (2013); and Alec Marsh's "John Kasper and Ezra Pound" (2015).


title: Ezra Pound

text: Much of Pound's legacy lies in his advancement of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century, particularly between 1910 and 1925. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, H.D., Aldington, and Aiken, he befriended and helped Cummings, Bunting, Ford, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Beyond this, his legacy is mixed. He was a strong lyricist with an "ear" for words; his "Times" obituary said he had a "faultless sense of cadence". According to Ira Nadel, he "overturned poetic meter, literary style, and the state of the long poem". Nadel cited the importance of Pound's editing of "The Waste Land", the publication of "Ulysses", and his role in developing of Imagism. Hugh Witemeyer argued that Imagism was "probably the most important single movement" in 20th-century English-language poetry, because it affected all the leading poets of Pound's generation and the two generations after him. According to Hugh Kenner in 1951, although no great contemporary writer was less read than Pound, there was no one who could "over and over again appeal more surely, through sheer beauty of language" to people who would otherwise rather talk about poets than read them.


title: Ezra Pound

text: Against this, Robert Conquest argued in 1979 that critics were responsible for having promoted Pound despite his "minimal talent", which was "grossly exaggerated". "This is an accusation less against the fantastic arrogance of Pound", he wrote, "than against the narrow-minded obscurantism of the departments of English and the critical establishment who have set up a system of apologetics which the slyest Jesuit of the seventeenth century would have baulked at." According to Samuel Putnam, those who respected Pound's poetry were less likely to respect his prose or work as a critic.


title: Ezra Pound

text: The outrage over his collaboration with the Axis powers was so deep that it dominated the discussion. "A greater calamity cannot befall the art", Arthur Miller wrote in December 1945, "than that Ezra Pound, the Mussolini mouthpiece, should be welcomed back as an arbiter of American letters ..." Over the decades, according to Redman, critics argued that Pound was not really a poet or not really a fascist, or that he was a fascist but his poetry is not fascistic, or that there was an evil Pound and a good Pound. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner and one of his hospital visitors—Pound called her "Liz Bish"—reflected the ambivalence in her poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths" (1957). "This is the time / of the tragic man / that lies in the house of Bedlam." As the poem progresses, the tragic man, never named, becomes the talkative man; the honored man; the old, brave man; the cranky man; the cruel man; the busy man; the tedious man; the poet, the man; and, finally, the wretched man.


title: Computer mouse

text: A computer mouse (plural mice, sometimes mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows a smooth control of the graphical user interface of a computer.


title: Computer mouse

text: The first public demonstration of a mouse controlling a computer system was in 1968. Mice originally used two separate wheels to track movement across a surface: one in the X-dimension and one in the Y. Later, the standard design shifted to utilize a ball rolling on a surface to detect motion. Most modern mice use optical sensors that have no moving parts. Though originally all mice were connected to a computer by a cable, many modern mice are cordless, relying on short-range radio communication with the connected system.


title: Computer mouse

text: In addition to moving a cursor, computer mice have one or more buttons to allow operations such as the selection of a menu item on a display. Mice often also feature other elements, such as touch surfaces and scroll wheels, which enable additional control and dimensional input.


title: Computer mouse

text: The earliest known written use of the term "mouse" in reference to a computer pointing device is in Bill English's July 1965 publication, "Computer-Aided Display Control", likely originating from its resemblance to the shape and size of a mouse, a rodent, with the cord resembling its tail. The popularity of wireless mice without cords makes the resemblance less obvious.


title: Computer mouse

text: According to Roger Bates, a hardware designer under English, the term also came about because the cursor on the screen was for some unknown reason referred to as "CAT" and was seen by the team as if it would be chasing the new desktop device.


title: Computer mouse

text: The plural for the small rodent is always "mice" in modern usage. The plural for a computer mouse is either "mice" or "mouses" according to most dictionaries, with "mice" being more common. The first recorded plural usage is "mice"; the online "Oxford Dictionaries" cites a 1984 use, and earlier uses include J. C. R. Licklider's "The Computer as a Communication Device" of 1968.


title: Computer mouse

text: The trackball, a related pointing device, was invented in 1946 by Ralph Benjamin as part of a post-World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called the Comprehensive Display System (CDS). Benjamin was then working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service. Benjamin's project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented what they called a "roller ball" for this purpose.


title: Computer mouse

text: The device was patented in 1947, but only a prototype using a metal ball rolling on two rubber-coated wheels was ever built, and the device was kept as a military secret.


title: Computer mouse

text: Another early trackball was built by Kenyon Taylor, a British electrical engineer working in collaboration with Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff. Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navy's DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving) system in 1952.


title: Computer mouse

text: DATAR was similar in concept to Benjamin's display. The trackball used four disks to pick up motion, two each for the X and Y directions. Several rollers provided mechanical support. When the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun and contacts on their outer rim made periodic contact with wires, producing pulses of output with each movement of the ball. By counting the pulses, the physical movement of the ball could be determined. A digital computer calculated the tracks and sent the resulting data to other ships in a task force using pulse-code modulation radio signals. This trackball used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball. It was not patented, since it was a secret military project.


title: Computer mouse

text: Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) has been credited in published books by Thierry Bardini, Paul Ceruzzi, Howard Rheingold, and several others as the inventor of the computer mouse. Engelbart was also recognized as such in various obituary titles after his death in July 2013.


title: Computer mouse

text: By 1963, Engelbart had already established a research lab at SRI, the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software computer technology to "augment" human intelligence. That November, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data. On 14 November 1963, he first recorded his thoughts in his personal notebook about something he initially called a "bug", which in a "3-point" form could have a "drop point and 2 orthogonal wheels". He wrote that the "bug" would be "easier" and "more natural" to use, and unlike a stylus, it would stay still when let go, which meant it would be "much better for coordination with the keyboard".


title: Computer mouse

text: In 1964, Bill English joined ARC, where he helped Engelbart build the first mouse prototype. They christened the device the "mouse" as early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device which looked like a tail, and in turn resembled the common mouse. According to Roger Bates, a hardware designer under English, another reason for choosing this name was because the cursor on the screen was also referred to as "CAT" at this time.


title: Computer mouse

text: As noted above, this "mouse" was first mentioned in print in a July 1965 report, on which English was the lead author. On 9 December 1968, Engelbart publicly demonstrated the mouse at what would come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart never received any royalties for it, as his employer SRI held the patent, which expired before the mouse became widely used in personal computers. In any event, the invention of the mouse was just a small part of Engelbart's much larger project of augmenting human intellect.


title: Computer mouse

text: Several other experimental pointing-devices developed for Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS) exploited different body movements – for example, head-mounted devices attached to the chin or nose – but ultimately the mouse won out because of its speed and convenience. The first mouse, a bulky device (pictured) used two potentiometers perpendicular to each other and connected to wheels: the rotation of each wheel translated into motion along one axis. At the time of the "Mother of All Demos", Engelbart's group had been using their second generation, 3-button mouse for about a year.


title: Computer mouse

text: On 2 October 1968, three years after Engelbart's prototype but more than two months before his public demo, a mouse device named "" (German for "rolling ball control") was shown in a sales brochure by the German company AEG-Telefunken as an optional input device for the SIG 100 vector graphics terminal, part of the system around their process computer TR 86 and the main frame. Based on an even earlier trackball device, the mouse device had been developed by the company since 1966 in what had been a parallel and independent discovery. As the name suggests and unlike Engelbart's mouse, the Telefunken model already had a ball (diameter 40 mm, weight 40 g) and two mechanical 4-bit rotational position transducers with Gray code-like states, allowing easy movement in any direction. The bits remained stable for at least two successive states to relax debouncing requirements. This arrangement was chosen so that the data could also be transmitted to the TR 86 front end process computer and over longer distance telex lines with c. 50 baud. Weighing 465 g, the device with a total height of about 7 cm came in a c. 12 cm diameter hemispherical injection-molded thermoplastic casing featuring one central push button.


title: Computer mouse

text: As noted above, the device was based on an earlier trackball-like device (also named ') that was embedded into radar flight control desks. This trackball had been originally developed by a team led by at Telefunken for the German ' (Federal Air Traffic Control). It was part of the corresponding work station system SAP 300 and the terminal SIG 3001, which had been designed and developed since 1963. Development for the TR 440 main frame began in 1965. This led to the development of the TR 86 process computer system with its SIG 100-86 terminal. Inspired by a discussion with a university customer, Mallebrein came up with the idea of "reversing" the existing trackball into a moveable mouse-like device in 1966, so that customers did not have to be bothered with mounting holes for the earlier trackball device. The device was finished in early 1968, and together with light pens and trackballs, it was commercially offered as an optional input device for their system starting later that year. Not all customers opted to buy the device, which added costs of per piece to the already up to 20-million DM deal for the main frame, of which only a total of 46 systems were sold or leased. They were installed at more than 20 German universities including RWTH Aachen, Technical University Berlin, University of Stuttgart and Konstanz. Several mice installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich in 1972 are well preserved in a museum, two others survived in a museum at Stuttgart university, two in Hamburg, the one from Aachen at the Computer History Museum in the US, and yet another sample was recently donated to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF) in Paderborn. Anecdotal reports claim that Telefunken's attempt to patent the device was rejected by the German Patent Office due to lack of inventiveness. For the air traffic control system, the Mallebrein team had already developed a precursor to touch screens in form of an ultrasonic-curtain-based pointing device in front of the display. In 1970, they developed a device named "Touchinput-" ("touch input facility") based on a conductively coated glass screen.


title: Computer mouse

text: The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use in 1973 and is regarded as the first modern computer to use a mouse. Inspired by PARC's Alto, the Lilith, a computer which had been developed by a team around Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich between 1978 and 1980, provided a mouse as well. The third marketed version of an integrated mouse shipped as a part of a computer and intended for personal computer navigation came with the Xerox 8010 Star in 1981.


title: Computer mouse

text: By 1982, the Xerox 8010 was probably the best-known computer with a mouse. The Sun-1 also came with a mouse, and the forthcoming Apple Lisa was rumored to use one, but the peripheral remained obscure; Jack Hawley of The Mouse House reported that one buyer for a large organization believed at first that his company sold lab mice. Hawley, who manufactured mice for Xerox, stated that "Practically, I have the market all to myself right now"; a Hawley mouse cost $415. In 1982, Logitech introduced the P4 Mouse at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, its first hardware mouse. That same year Microsoft made the decision to make the MS-DOS program Microsoft Word mouse-compatible, and developed the first PC-compatible mouse. Microsoft's mouse shipped in 1983, thus beginning the Microsoft Hardware division of the company. However, the mouse remained relatively obscure until the appearance of the Macintosh 128K (which included an updated version of the single-button Lisa Mouse) in 1984, and of the Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST in 1985.


title: Computer mouse

text: A mouse typically controls the motion of a pointer in two dimensions in a graphical user interface (GUI). The mouse turns movements of the hand backward and forward, left and right into equivalent electronic signals that in turn are used to move the pointer.


title: Computer mouse

text: The relative movements of the mouse on the surface are applied to the position of the pointer on the screen, which signals the point where actions of the user take place, so hand movements are replicated by the pointer. Clicking or pointing (stopping movement while the cursor is within the bounds of an area) can select files, programs or actions from a list of names, or (in graphical interfaces) through small images called "icons" and other elements. For example, a text file might be represented by a picture of a paper notebook and clicking while the cursor points at this icon might cause a text editing program to open the file in a window.


title: Computer mouse

text: Users can also employ mice "gesturally", meaning that a stylized motion of the mouse cursor itself, called a "gesture", can issue a command or map to a specific action. For example, in a drawing program, moving the mouse in a rapid "x" motion over a shape might delete the shape.


title: Computer mouse

text: Gestural interfaces occur more rarely than plain pointing-and-clicking, and people often find them more difficult to use because they require finer motor control from the user. However, a few gestural conventions have become widespread, including the drag and drop gesture, in which:


title: Computer mouse

text: For example, a user might drag-and-drop a picture representing a file onto a picture of a trash can, thus instructing the system to delete the file.


title: Computer mouse

text: Other uses of the mouse's input occur commonly in special application domains. In interactive three-dimensional graphics, the mouse's motion often translates directly into changes in the virtual objects' or camera's orientation. For example, in the first-person shooter genre of games (see below), players usually employ the mouse to control the direction in which the virtual player's "head" faces: moving the mouse up will cause the player to look up, revealing the view above the player's head. A related function makes an image of an object rotate so that all sides can be examined. 3D design and animation software often modally chord many different combinations to allow objects and cameras to be rotated and moved through space with the few axes of movement mice can detect.


title: Computer mouse

text: When mice have more than one button, the software may assign different functions to each button. Often, the primary (leftmost in a right-handed configuration) button on the mouse will select items, and the secondary (rightmost in a right-handed) button will bring up a menu of alternative actions applicable to that item. For example, on platforms with more than one button, the Mozilla web browser will follow a link in response to a primary button click, will bring up a contextual menu of alternative actions for that link in response to a secondary-button click, and will often open the link in a new tab or window in response to a click with the tertiary (middle) mouse button.


title: Computer mouse

text: The German company Telefunken published on their early ball mouse on 2 October 1968. Telefunken's mouse was sold as optional equipment for their computer systems. Bill English, builder of Engelbart's original mouse, created a ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC.


title: Computer mouse

text: The ball mouse replaced the external wheels with a single ball that could rotate in any direction. It came as part of the hardware package of the Xerox Alto computer. Perpendicular chopper wheels housed inside the mouse's body chopped beams of light on the way to light sensors, thus detecting in their turn the motion of the ball. This variant of the mouse resembled an inverted trackball and became the predominant form used with personal computers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The Xerox PARC group also settled on the modern technique of using both hands to type on a full-size keyboard and grabbing the mouse when required.


title: Computer mouse

text: The ball mouse has two freely rotating rollers. These are located 90 degrees apart. One roller detects the forward-backward motion of the mouse and the other the left-right motion. Opposite the two rollers is a third one (white, in the photo, at 45 degrees) that is spring-loaded to push the ball against the other two rollers. Each roller is on the same shaft as an encoder wheel that has slotted edges; the slots interrupt infrared light beams to generate electrical pulses that represent wheel movement. Each wheel's disc has a pair of light beams, located so that a given beam becomes interrupted or again starts to pass light freely when the other beam of the pair is about halfway between changes.


title: Computer mouse

text: Simple logic circuits interpret the relative timing to indicate which direction the wheel is rotating. This incremental rotary encoder scheme is sometimes called quadrature encoding of the wheel rotation, as the two optical sensors produce signals that are in approximately quadrature phase. The mouse sends these signals to the computer system via the mouse cable, directly as logic signals in very old mice such as the Xerox mice, and via a data-formatting IC in modern mice. The driver software in the system converts the signals into motion of the mouse cursor along X and Y axes on the computer screen.


title: Computer mouse

text: The ball is mostly steel, with a precision spherical rubber surface. The weight of the ball, given an appropriate working surface under the mouse, provides a reliable grip so the mouse's movement is transmitted accurately. Ball mice and wheel mice were manufactured for Xerox by Jack Hawley, doing business as The Mouse House in Berkeley, California, starting in 1975. Based on another invention by Jack Hawley, proprietor of the Mouse House, Honeywell produced another type of mechanical mouse. Instead of a ball, it had two wheels rotating at off axes. Key Tronic later produced a similar product.


title: Computer mouse

text: Modern computer mice took form at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) under the inspiration of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud and at the hands of engineer and watchmaker André Guignard. This new design incorporated a single hard rubber mouseball and three buttons, and remained a common design until the mainstream adoption of the scroll-wheel mouse during the 1990s. In 1985, René Sommer added a microprocessor to Nicoud's and Guignard's design. Through this innovation, Sommer is credited with inventing a significant component of the mouse, which made it more "intelligent"; though optical mice from Mouse Systems had incorporated microprocessors by 1984.


title: Computer mouse

text: Another type of mechanical mouse, the "analog mouse" (now generally regarded as obsolete), uses potentiometers rather than encoder wheels, and is typically designed to be plug compatible with an analog joystick. The "Color Mouse", originally marketed by RadioShack for their Color Computer (but also usable on MS-DOS machines equipped with analog joystick ports, provided the software accepted joystick input) was the best-known example.


title: Computer mouse

text: Early optical mice relied entirely on one or more light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and an imaging array of photodiodes to detect movement relative to the underlying surface, eschewing the internal moving parts a mechanical mouse uses in addition to its optics. A laser mouse is an optical mouse that uses coherent (laser) light.


title: Computer mouse

text: The earliest optical mice detected movement on pre-printed mousepad surfaces, whereas the modern LED optical mouse works on most opaque diffuse surfaces; it is usually unable to detect movement on specular surfaces like polished stone. Laser diodes provide good resolution and precision, improving performance on opaque specular surfaces. Later, more surface-independent optical mice use an optoelectronic sensor (essentially, a tiny low-resolution video camera) to take successive images of the surface on which the mouse operates. Battery powered, wireless optical mice flash the LED intermittently to save power, and only glow steadily when movement is detected.


title: Computer mouse

text: Often called "air mice" since they do not require a surface to operate, inertial mice use a tuning fork or other accelerometer (US Patent 4787051) to detect rotary movement for every axis supported. The most common models (manufactured by Logitech and Gyration) work using 2 degrees of rotational freedom and are insensitive to spatial translation. The user requires only small wrist rotations to move the cursor, reducing user fatigue or "gorilla arm".


title: Computer mouse

text: Usually cordless, they often have a switch to deactivate the movement circuitry between use, allowing the user freedom of movement without affecting the cursor position. A patent for an inertial mouse claims that such mice consume less power than optically based mice, and offer increased sensitivity, reduced weight and increased ease-of-use. In combination with a wireless keyboard an inertial mouse can offer alternative ergonomic arrangements which do not require a flat work surface, potentially alleviating some types of repetitive motion injuries related to workstation posture.


title: Computer mouse

text: Also known as bats, flying mice, or wands, these devices generally function through ultrasound and provide at least three degrees of freedom. Probably the best known example would be 3Dconnexion ("Logitech's SpaceMouse") from the early 1990s. In the late 1990s Kantek introduced the 3D RingMouse. This wireless mouse was worn on a ring around a finger, which enabled the thumb to access three buttons. The mouse was tracked in three dimensions by a base station. Despite a certain appeal, it was finally discontinued because it did not provide sufficient resolution.


title: Computer mouse

text: One example of a 2000s consumer 3D pointing device is the Wii Remote. While primarily a motion-sensing device (that is, it can determine its orientation and direction of movement), Wii Remote can also detect its spatial position by comparing the distance and position of the lights from the IR emitter using its integrated IR camera (since the nunchuk accessory lacks a camera, it can only tell its current heading and orientation). The obvious drawback to this approach is that it can only produce spatial coordinates while its camera can see the sensor bar. More accurate consumer devices have since been released, including the PlayStation Move, the Razer Hydra, and the controllers part of the HTC Vive virtual reality system. All of these devices can accurately detect position and orientation in 3D space regardless of angle relative to the sensor station.


title: Computer mouse

text: A mouse-related controller called the SpaceBall has a ball placed above the work surface that can easily be gripped. With spring-loaded centering, it sends both translational as well as angular displacements on all six axes, in both directions for each. In November 2010 a German Company called Axsotic introduced a new concept of 3D mouse called 3D Spheric Mouse. This new concept of a true six degree-of-freedom input device uses a ball to rotate in 3 axes and an elastic polymer anchored tetrahedron inspired suspension for translating the ball without any limitations. A contactless sensor design uses a magnetic sensor array for sensing three aches translation and two optical mouse sensors for three aches rotation. The special tetrahedron suspension allows a user to rotate the ball with the fingers while input translations with the hand-wrist motion.


title: Computer mouse

text: In 2000, Logitech introduced a "tactile mouse" known as the "iFeel Mouse" developed by Immersion Corporation that contained a small actuator to enable the mouse to generate simulated physical sensations. Such a mouse can augment user-interfaces with haptic feedback, such as giving feedback when crossing a window boundary. To surf the internet by touch-enabled mouse was first developed in 1996 and first implemented commercially by the Wingman Force Feedback Mouse. It requires the user to be able to feel depth or hardness; this ability was realized with the first electrorheological tactile mice but never marketed.


title: Computer mouse

text: Tablet digitizers are sometimes used with accessories called pucks, devices which rely on absolute positioning, but can be configured for sufficiently mouse-like relative tracking that they are sometimes marketed as mice.


title: Computer mouse

text: As the name suggests, this type of mouse is intended to provide optimum comfort and avoid injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis, and other repetitive strain injuries. It is designed to fit natural hand position and movements, to reduce discomfort.


title: Computer mouse

text: When holding a typical mouse, the ulna and radius bones on the arm are crossed. Some designs attempt to place the palm more vertically, so the bones take more natural parallel position. Some limit wrist movement, encouraging arm movement instead, that may be less precise but more optimal from the health point of view. A mouse may be angled from the thumb downward to the opposite side – this is known to reduce wrist pronation. However such optimizations make the mouse right or left hand specific, making more problematic to change the tired hand. "Time" has criticized manufacturers for offering few or no left-handed ergonomic mice: "Oftentimes I felt like I was dealing with someone who'd never actually met a left-handed person before."


title: Computer mouse

text: Another solution is a pointing bar device. The so-called "roller bar mouse" is positioned snugly in front of the keyboard, thus allowing bi-manual accessibility.


title: Computer mouse

text: These mice are specifically designed for use in computer games. They typically employ a wider array of controls and buttons and have designs that differ radically from traditional mice. They may also have decorative monochrome or programmable RGB LED lighting. The additional buttons can often be used for changing the sensitivity of the mouse or they can be assigned (programmed) to macros (i.e., for opening a program or for use instead of a key combination). It is also common for game mice, especially those designed for use in real-time strategy games such as "StarCraft", or in multiplayer online battle arena games such as League of Legends to have a relatively high sensitivity, measured in dots per inch (DPI), which can be as high as 25,600. Some advanced mice from gaming manufacturers also allow users to adjust the weight of the mouse by adding or subtracting weights to allow for easier control. Ergonomic quality is also an important factor in gaming mouse, as extended gameplay times may render further use of the mouse to be uncomfortable. Some mice have been designed to have adjustable features such as removable and/or elongated palm rests, horizontally adjustable thumb rests and pinky rests. Some mice may include several different rests with their products to ensure comfort for a wider range of target consumers. Gaming mice are held by gamers in three styles of grip:


title: Computer mouse

text: To transmit their input, typical cabled mice use a thin electrical cord terminating in a standard connector, such as RS-232C, PS/2, ADB, or USB. Cordless mice instead transmit data via infrared radiation (see IrDA) or radio (including Bluetooth), although many such cordless interfaces are themselves connected through the aforementioned wired serial buses.


title: Computer mouse

text: While the electrical interface and the format of the data transmitted by commonly available mice is currently standardized on USB, in the past it varied between different manufacturers. A bus mouse used a dedicated interface card for connection to an IBM PC or compatible computer.


title: Computer mouse

text: Mouse use in DOS applications became more common after the introduction of the Microsoft Mouse, largely because Microsoft provided an open standard for communication between applications and mouse driver software. Thus, any application written to use the Microsoft standard could use a mouse with a driver that implements the same API, even if the mouse hardware itself was incompatible with Microsoft's. This driver provides the state of the buttons and the distance the mouse has moved in units that its documentation calls "mickeys".


title: Computer mouse

text: In the 1970s, the Xerox Alto mouse, and in the 1980s the Xerox optical mouse, used a quadrature-encoded X and Y interface. This two-bit encoding per dimension had the property that only one bit of the two would change at a time, like a Gray code or Johnson counter, so that the transitions would not be misinterpreted when asynchronously sampled.


title: Computer mouse

text: The earliest mass-market mice, such as on the original Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST mice used a D-subminiature 9-pin connector to send the quadrature-encoded X and Y axis signals directly, plus one pin per mouse button. The mouse was a simple optomechanical device, and the decoding circuitry was all in the main computer.


title: Computer mouse

text: The DE-9 connectors were designed to be electrically compatible with the joysticks popular on numerous 8-bit systems, such as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600. Although the ports could be used for both purposes, the signals must be interpreted differently. As a result, plugging a mouse into a joystick port causes the "joystick" to continuously move in some direction, even if the mouse stays still, whereas plugging a joystick into a mouse port causes the "mouse" to only be able to move a single pixel in each direction.


title: Computer mouse

text: Because the IBM PC did not have a quadrature decoder built in, early PC mice used the RS-232C serial port to communicate encoded mouse movements, as well as provide power to the mouse's circuits. The Mouse Systems Corporation version used a five-byte protocol and supported three buttons. The Microsoft version used a three-byte protocol and supported two buttons. Due to the incompatibility between the two protocols, some manufacturers sold serial mice with a mode switch: "PC" for MSC mode, "MS" for Microsoft mode.


title: Computer mouse

text: In 1986 Apple first implemented the Apple Desktop Bus allowing the daisy chaining of up to 16 devices, including mice and other devices on the same bus with no configuration whatsoever. Featuring only a single data pin, the bus used a purely polled approach to device communications and survived as the standard on mainstream models (including a number of non-Apple workstations) until 1998 when Apple's iMac line of computers joined the industry-wide switch to using USB. Beginning with the Bronze Keyboard PowerBook G3 in May 1999, Apple dropped the external ADB port in favor of USB, but retained an internal ADB connection in the PowerBook G4 for communication with its built-in keyboard and trackpad until early 2005.


title: Computer mouse

text: With the arrival of the IBM PS/2 personal-computer series in 1987, IBM introduced the eponymous PS/2 port for mice and keyboards, which other manufacturers rapidly adopted. The most visible change was the use of a round 6-pin mini-DIN, in lieu of the former 5-pin MIDI style full sized DIN 41524 connector. In default mode (called "stream mode") a PS/2 mouse communicates motion, and the state of each button, by means of 3-byte packets. For any motion, button press or button release event, a PS/2 mouse sends, over a bi-directional serial port, a sequence of three bytes, with the following format:


title: Computer mouse

text: Here, XS and YS represent the sign bits of the movement vectors, XV and YV indicate an overflow in the respective vector component, and LB, MB and RB indicate the status of the left, middle and right mouse buttons (1 = pressed). PS/2 mice also understand several commands for reset and self-test, switching between different operating modes, and changing the resolution of the reported motion vectors.


title: Computer mouse

text: A Microsoft IntelliMouse relies on an extension of the PS/2 protocol: the ImPS/2 or IMPS/2 protocol (the abbreviation combines the concepts of "IntelliMouse" and "PS/2"). It initially operates in standard PS/2 format, for backward compatibility. After the host sends a special command sequence, it switches to an extended format in which a fourth byte carries information about wheel movements. The IntelliMouse Explorer works analogously, with the difference that its 4-byte packets also allow for two additional buttons (for a total of five).


title: Computer mouse

text: Mouse vendors also use other extended formats, often without providing public documentation. The Typhoon mouse uses 6-byte packets which can appear as a sequence of two standard 3-byte packets, such that an ordinary PS/2 driver can handle them. For 3-D (or 6-degree-of-freedom) input, vendors have made many extensions both to the hardware and to software. In the late 1990s, Logitech created ultrasound based tracking which gave 3D input to a few millimeters accuracy, which worked well as an input device but failed as a profitable product. In 2008, Motion4U introduced its "OptiBurst" system using IR tracking for use as a Maya (graphics software) plugin.


title: Computer mouse

text: The industry-standard USB (Universal Serial Bus) protocol and its connector have become widely used for mice; it is among the most popular types.


title: Computer mouse

text: Cordless or wireless mice transmit data via radio. Some mice connect to the computer through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, while others use a receiver that plugs into the computer, for example through a USB port.


title: Computer mouse

text: Many mice that use a USB receiver have a storage compartment for it inside the mouse. Some "nano receivers" are designed to be small enough to remain plugged into a laptop during transport, while still being large enough to easily remove.


title: Computer mouse

text: MS-DOS and Windows 1.0 support connecting a mouse such as a Microsoft Mouse via multiple interfaces: BallPoint, Bus (InPort), Serial port or PS/2.


title: Computer mouse

text: Windows 98 added built-in support for USB Human Interface Device class (USB HID), with native vertical scrolling support. Windows 2000 and Windows Me expanded this built-in support to 5-button mice.


title: Computer mouse

text: Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduced a Bluetooth stack, allowing Bluetooth mice to be used without any USB receivers. Windows Vista added native support for horizontal scrolling and standardized wheel movement granularity for finer scrolling.


title: Computer mouse

text: Some systems allow two or more mice to be used at once as input devices. Late-1980s era home computers such as the Amiga used this to allow computer games with two players interacting on the same computer (Lemmings and The Settlers for example). The same idea is sometimes used in collaborative software, e.g. to simulate a whiteboard that multiple users can draw on without passing a single mouse around.


title: Computer mouse

text: Microsoft Windows, since Windows 98, has supported multiple simultaneous pointing devices. Because Windows only provides a single screen cursor, using more than one device at the same time requires cooperation of users or applications designed for multiple input devices.


title: Computer mouse

text: Multiple mice are often used in multi-user gaming in addition to specially designed devices that provide several input interfaces.


title: Computer mouse

text: Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft introduced an SDK for developing applications that allow multiple input devices to be used at the same time with independent cursors and independent input points. However, it no longer appears to be available.


title: Computer mouse

text: The introduction of Windows Vista and Microsoft Surface (now known as Microsoft PixelSense) introduced a new set of input APIs that were adopted into Windows 7, allowing for 50 points/cursors, all controlled by independent users. The new input points provide traditional mouse input; however, they were designed with other input technologies like touch and image in mind. They inherently offer 3D coordinates along with pressure, size, tilt, angle, mask, and even an image bitmap to see and recognize the input point/object on the screen.


title: Computer mouse

text: As of 2009, Linux distributions and other operating systems that use X.Org, such as OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, support 255 cursors/input points through Multi-Pointer X. However, currently no window managers support Multi-Pointer X leaving it relegated to custom software usage.


title: Computer mouse

text: There have also been propositions of having a single operator use two mice simultaneously as a more sophisticated means of controlling various graphics and multimedia applications.


title: Computer mouse

text: Mouse buttons are microswitches which can be pressed to select or interact with an element of a graphical user interface, producing a distinctive clicking sound.


title: Computer mouse

text: Since around the late 1990s, the three-button scrollmouse has become the de facto standard. Users most commonly employ the second button to invoke a contextual menu in the computer's software user interface, which contains options specifically tailored to the interface element over which the mouse cursor currently sits. By default, the primary mouse button sits located on the left-hand side of the mouse, for the benefit of right-handed users; left-handed users can usually reverse this configuration via software.


title: Computer mouse

text: Nearly all mice now have an integrated input primarily intended for scrolling on top, usually a single-axis digital wheel or rocker switch which can also be depressed to act as a third button. Though less common, many mice instead have two-axis inputs such as a tiltable wheel, trackball, or touchpad. Those with a trackball may be designed to stay stationary, using the trackball instead of moving the mouse.


title: Computer mouse

text: Mickeys per second is a unit of measurement for the speed and movement direction of a computer mouse, where direction is often expressed as "horizontal" versus "vertical" mickey count. However, speed can also refer to the ratio between how many pixels the cursor moves on the screen and how far the mouse moves on the mouse pad, which may be expressed as pixels per mickey, pixels per inch, or pixels per centimeter.


title: Computer mouse

text: The computer industry often measures mouse sensitivity in terms of counts per inch (CPI), commonly expressed as dots per inch (DPI)the number of steps the mouse will report when it moves one inch. In early mice, this specification was called pulses per inch (ppi). The mickey originally referred to one of these counts, or one resolvable step of motion. If the default mouse-tracking condition involves moving the cursor by one screen-pixel or dot on-screen per reported step, then the CPI does equate to DPI: dots of cursor motion per inch of mouse motion. The CPI or DPI as reported by manufacturers depends on how they make the mouse; the higher the CPI, the faster the cursor moves with mouse movement. However, software can adjust the mouse sensitivity, making the cursor move faster or slower than its CPI. software can change the speed of the cursor dynamically, taking into account the mouse's absolute speed and the movement from the last stop-point. In most software, an example being the Windows platforms, this setting is named "speed", referring to "cursor precision". However, some operating systems name this setting "acceleration", the typical Apple OS designation. This term is incorrect. Mouse acceleration in most mouse software refers to the change in speed of the cursor over time while the mouse movement is constant.


title: Computer mouse

text: For simple software, when the mouse starts to move, the software will count the number of "counts" or "mickeys" received from the mouse and will move the cursor across the screen by that number of pixels (or multiplied by a rate factor, typically less than 1). The cursor will move slowly on the screen, with good precision. When the movement of the mouse passes the value set for some threshold, the software will start to move the cursor faster, with a greater rate factor. Usually, the user can set the value of the second rate factor by changing the "acceleration" setting.


title: Computer mouse

text: Operating systems sometimes apply acceleration, referred to as "ballistics", to the motion reported by the mouse. For example, versions of Windows prior to Windows XP doubled reported values above a configurable threshold, and then optionally doubled them again above a second configurable threshold. These doublings applied separately in the X and Y directions, resulting in very nonlinear response.


title: Computer mouse

text: Engelbart's original mouse did not require a mousepad; the mouse had two large wheels which could roll on virtually any surface. However, most subsequent mechanical mice starting with the steel roller ball mouse have required a mousepad for optimal performance.


title: Computer mouse

text: The mousepad, the most common mouse accessory, appears most commonly in conjunction with mechanical mice, because to roll smoothly the ball requires more friction than common desk surfaces usually provide. So-called "hard mousepads" for gamers or optical/laser mice also exist.


title: Computer mouse

text: Most optical and laser mice do not require a pad, the notable exception being early optical mice which relied on a grid on the pad to detect movement (e.g. Mouse Systems). Whether to use a hard or soft mousepad with an optical mouse is largely a matter of personal preference. One exception occurs when the desk surface creates problems for the optical or laser tracking, for example, a transparent or reflective surface, such as glass.


title: Computer mouse

text: Some mice also come with small "pads" attached to the bottom surface, also called mouse feet or mouse skates, that help the user slide the mouse smoothly across surfaces.


title: Computer mouse

text: Around 1981, Xerox included mice with its Xerox Star, based on the mouse used in the 1970s on the Alto computer at Xerox PARC. Sun Microsystems, Symbolics, Lisp Machines Inc., and Tektronix also shipped workstations with mice, starting in about 1981. Later, inspired by the Star, Apple Computer released the Apple Lisa, which also used a mouse. However, none of these products achieved large-scale success. Only with the release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 did the mouse see widespread use.


title: Computer mouse

text: The Macintosh design, commercially successful and technically influential, led many other vendors to begin producing mice or including them with their other computer products (by 1986, Atari ST, Amiga, Windows 1.0, GEOS for the Commodore 64, and the Apple IIGS).


title: Computer mouse

text: The widespread adoption of graphical user interfaces in the software of the 1980s and 1990s made mice all but indispensable for controlling computers. In November 2008, Logitech built their billionth mouse.


title: Computer mouse

text: The device often functions as an interface for PC-based computer games and sometimes for video game consoles. The Classic Mac OS Desk Accessory "Puzzle" in 1984 was the first game designed specifically for a mouse.


title: Computer mouse

text: FPSs naturally lend themselves to separate and simultaneous control of the player's movement and aim, and on computers this has traditionally been achieved with a combination of keyboard and mouse. Players use the X-axis of the mouse for looking (or turning) left and right, and the Y-axis for looking up and down; the keyboard is used for movement and supplemental inputs.


title: Computer mouse

text: Many shooting genre players prefer a mouse over a gamepad analog stick because the wide range of motion offered by a mouse allows for faster and more varied control. Although an analog stick allows the player more granular control, it is poor for certain movements, as the player's input is relayed based on a vector of both the stick's direction and magnitude. Thus, a small but fast movement (known as "flick-shotting") using a gamepad requires the player to quickly move the stick from its rest position to the edge and back again in quick succession, a difficult maneuver. In addition the stick also has a finite magnitude; if the player is currently using the stick to move at a non-zero velocity their ability to increase the rate of movement of the camera is further limited based on the position their displaced stick was already at before executing the maneuver. The effect of this is that a mouse is well suited not only to small, precise movements but also to large, quick movements and immediate, responsive movements; all of which are important in shooter gaming. This advantage also extends in varying degrees to similar game styles such as third-person shooters.


title: Computer mouse

text: Some incorrectly ported games or game engines have acceleration and interpolation curves which unintentionally produce excessive, irregular, or even negative acceleration when used with a mouse instead of their native platform's non-mouse default input device. Depending on how deeply hardcoded this misbehavior is, internal user patches or external 3rd-party software may be able to fix it. Individual game engines will also have their own sensitivities. This often restricts one from taking a game's existing sensitivity, transferring it to another, and acquiring the same 360 rotational measurements. A sensitivity converter is required in order to translate rotational movements properly.


title: Computer mouse

text: Due to their similarity to the WIMP desktop metaphor interface for which mice were originally designed, and to their own tabletop game origins, computer strategy games are most commonly played with mice. In particular, real-time strategy and MOBA games usually require the use of a mouse.


title: Computer mouse

text: The left button usually controls primary fire. If the game supports multiple fire modes, the right button often provides secondary fire from the selected weapon. Games with only a single fire mode will generally map secondary fire to "aim down the weapon sights". In some games, the right button may also invoke accessories for a particular weapon, such as allowing access to the scope of a sniper rifle or allowing the mounting of a bayonet or silencer.


title: Computer mouse

text: Players can use a scroll wheel for changing weapons (or for controlling scope-zoom magnification, in older games). On most first person shooter games, programming may also assign more functions to additional buttons on mice with more than three controls. A keyboard usually controls movement (for example, WASD for moving forward, left, backward, and right, respectively) and other functions such as changing posture. Since the mouse serves for aiming, a mouse that tracks movement accurately and with less lag (latency) will give a player an advantage over players with less accurate or slower mice. In some cases the right mouse button may be used to move the player forward, either in lieu of, or in conjunction with the typical WASD configuration.


title: Computer mouse

text: Many games provide players with the option of mapping their own choice of a key or button to a certain control. An early technique of players, circle strafing, saw a player continuously strafing while aiming and shooting at an opponent by walking in circle around the opponent with the opponent at the center of the circle. Players could achieve this by holding down a key for strafing while continuously aiming the mouse toward the opponent.


title: Computer mouse

text: Games using mice for input are so popular that many manufacturers make mice specifically for gaming. Such mice may feature adjustable weights, high-resolution optical or laser components, additional buttons, ergonomic shape, and other features such as adjustable CPI. Mouse Bungees are typically used with gaming mice because it eliminates the annoyance of the cable.


title: Computer mouse

text: Many games, such as first- or third-person shooters, have a setting named "invert mouse" or similar (not to be confused with "button inversion", sometimes performed by left-handed users) which allows the user to look downward by moving the mouse forward and upward by moving the mouse backward (the opposite of non-inverted movement). This control system resembles that of aircraft control sticks, where pulling back causes pitch up and pushing forward causes pitch down; computer joysticks also typically emulate this control-configuration.


title: Computer mouse

text: After id Software's commercial hit of "Doom", which did not support vertical aiming, competitor Bungie's "Marathon" became the first first-person shooter to support using the mouse to aim up and down. Games using the Build engine had an option to invert the Y-axis. The "invert" feature actually made the mouse behave in a manner that users regard as non-inverted (by default, moving mouse forward resulted in looking down). Soon after, id Software released "Quake", which introduced the invert feature as users know it.


title: Computer mouse

text: In 1988, the VTech Socrates educational video game console featured a wireless mouse with an attached mouse pad as an optional controller used for some games. In the early 1990s, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game system featured a mouse in addition to its controllers. A mouse was also released for the Nintendo 64, although it was only released in Japan. The 1992 game "Mario Paint" in particular used the mouse's capabilities, as did its Japanese-only successor "Mario Artist" on the N64 for its 64DD disk drive peripheral in 1999. Sega released official mice for their Genesis/Mega Drive, Saturn and Dreamcast consoles. NEC sold official mice for its PC Engine and PC-FX consoles. Sony released an official mouse product for the PlayStation console, included one along with the Linux for PlayStation 2 kit, as well as allowing owners to use virtually any USB mouse with the PS2, PS3, and PS4. Nintendo's Wii also had this feature implemented in a later software update, and this support was retained on its successor, the Wii U. Microsoft's Xbox line of game consoles (which used operaring systems based on modified versions of Windows NT) also had universal-wide mouse support using USB.


title: No Man's Sky

text: No Man's Sky is an action-adventure survival game developed and published by Hello Games. It was released worldwide for the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in August 2016, for Xbox One in July 2018, for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in November 2020, and for Nintendo Switch in October 2022, while ports for macOS and iPadOS are in development. The game is built around five pillars: exploration, survival, combat, trading and base building. Players are free to perform within the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets. Through the game's procedural generation system, planets have their own ecosystems with unique forms of flora and fauna, and various alien species may engage the player in combat or trade within planetary systems. Players advance in the game by mining for resources to power and improve their equipment, buying and selling resources using credits earned by documenting flora and fauna, building planetary bases and expanding space fleets, or otherwise following the game's overarching plot by seeking out the mystery around the entity known as The Atlas.


title: No Man's Sky

text: Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, had wanted to create a game that captured the sense of exploration and optimism of science fiction writings and art of the 1970s and 1980s. The game was developed over three years by a small team at Hello Games with promotional and publishing help from Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game was seen as an ambitious project for a small team by the gaming media, and Murray and Hello Games drew significant attention leading to its release.


title: No Man's Sky

text: "No Man's Sky" received mixed reviews at its 2016 launch, with some critics praising the technical achievements of the procedurally generated universe, while others considered the gameplay lackluster and repetitive. However, the critical response was marred by the lack of several features that had been reported to be in the game, particularly multiplayer capabilities. The game was further criticised due to Hello Games' lack of communication in the months following the launch, creating a hostile backlash from some of its players. Murray stated later that Hello Games had failed to control hype around the game and the larger-than-expected player count at launch, and since have taken an approach of remaining quiet about updates to the game until they are nearly ready to release. The promotion and marketing for "No Man's Sky" became a subject of debate and has been cited as an example of what to avoid in video game marketing.


title: No Man's Sky

text: Since the game's initial release, Hello Games has continued to improve and expand "No Man's Sky" to achieve the vision of the experience they wanted to build. The game has received multiple free major content updates that have added several previously missing features, such as multiplayer components, while adding features like surface vehicles, base-building, space fleet management, cross-platform play, and virtual reality support. This has substantially improved "No Man's Sky"s overall reception and is considered to have redeemed both the game and Hello Games from the troublesome launch.


title: No Man's Sky

text: "No Man's Sky" is an action-adventure survival game played from a first or third person perspective that allows players to engage in four principal activities: exploration, survival, combat, and trading. The player takes the role of a specimen of alien humanoid planetary explorer, known in-game as the Traveller, in an uncharted universe. They start on a randomized planet near a crashed spacecraft towards the edge of the galaxy, and are equipped with a survival exosuit with a jetpack, and a "multitool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and hostile forces. The player can collect, repair, and refuel the craft, allowing them to travel about the planet, between other planets and space stations in the local planetary system, engage in space combat with alien factions, or make hyperspace jumps to other star systems. While the game is open ended, the player may follow the guidance of the entity known as The Atlas to head towards the centre of the galaxy.


title: No Man's Sky

text: The defining feature of "No Man's Sky" is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion (1.8×) planets to explore within the game. Very little data is stored on the game's servers, as all elements of the game are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. The player may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity. Until July 2020, the game used different servers for each platform versions; following a July 2020 patch, cross-platform play was enabled for all supported platforms.


title: No Man's Sky

text: Through exploration, the player is credited with units, the in-game currency, by scanning planets, alien bases, flora and fauna in their travels. If the player is first to discover one of these, they can earn additional units by uploading this information to The Atlas, as well as having their name credited with the discovery to be seen by other players. Players have the opportunity to rename these features at this point within limits set by a content filter. "No Man's Sky" can be played offline, but interaction with The Atlas requires online connectivity.


title: No Man's Sky

text: The player must assure the survival of the Traveller, as many planets have dangerous atmospheres such as extreme temperatures, toxic gases, and dangerous storms. Though the player can seek shelter at alien bases or caves, these environments will wear away at the exosuit's shielding and armour and can kill the Traveller, thus the player must collect resources necessary for survival. By collecting blueprints, the player can use resources to craft upgrades to their exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft to make survival easier, with several of these upgrades working in synergistic manners to improve the survivability and capabilities of the Traveller. Each of these elements have a limited number of slots for both upgrades and resource space, requiring the player to manage their inventories and feature sets, though the player can either gain new slots for the exosuit or purchase new ships and multitools with more slots. Many features of the exosuit, multitool, and spacecraft need to be refuelled after prolonged use, using collected resources as a fuel source.


title: No Man's Sky

text: While on a planet, the Traveller may be attacked by hostile creatures. They also may be attacked by Sentinels, a self-replicating robot force that patrols the planets and takes action against those that take the planet's resources. The player can fend these off using the weapons installed on the multitool. The game uses a "wanted level". Low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while walking machines, such as the Walker or Quad can assault the player at higher wanted levels. While in space, the Traveller may be attacked by pirates seeking their ship's cargo, or by alien factions with whom they have a poor reputation. Here, the player can use the ship's weapon systems to engage in these battles. Should the Traveller die on a planet, they will be respawned at their last save point without their exosuit's inventory; the player can recover these materials if the player can reach the last death location. If the Traveller dies in space, they will similarly respawn at the local system's space station, but having lost all the goods aboard their ship. Again, these goods can be recovered by travelling to the point at which the player died in space, but with the added uncertainty of pirates claiming the goods first.


title: No Man's Sky

text: Most star systems have a space station where the Traveller can trade resources, multitools, and ships, and interact with one or more aliens from three different races that populate the galaxy, as well as other travellers. Trading posts planets offer similar functions. Each alien race has their own language, with word-for-word substitutions which initially will be nonsense to the player. By frequent communications with that race, as well as finding monoliths scattered on planets that help in translating, the player can better understand these languages and perform proper actions when interacting with the alien non-player characters, gaining favour from the alien and its race for future trading and combat. Consequentially, improper responses to aliens may cause them to dislike the Traveller, and their space-bound fleets may attack the Traveller on sight. The game includes a free market galactic store accessible at space stations and trading posts, where some resources and goods have higher values in some systems compared to others, enabling the player to profit on resource gathering and subsequent trade.


title: No Man's Sky

text: The game has deep crafting capabilities, allowing players to craft technology upgrades, components for more complex items, tradable resources, base construction parts, food and ammo. Crafting requires blueprints, which are unlocked by digging up data modules and trading them in at spacestations. Resources are stored in inventories in the players exosuit, ship, freighter, exocraft, nutrient processor, and storage containers. Resources can be processed into other resources using refiners or nutrient processors, allowing all kinds of food to be created.


title: No Man's Sky

text: "No Man's Sky" is primarily designed as a single-player game, though discoveries can be shared to all players via the Steam Workshop, and friends can track each other on the game's galactic map. Hello Games' Sean Murray stated that one might spend about forty hours of game-time to reach the centre of the galaxy if they did not perform any side activities, but he also said that he fully anticipated that players would play the game in a manner that suits them, such as having those that might try to catalogue the flora and fauna in the universe, while others may attempt to set up trade routes between planets. Players can track friends on the galactic map and the system maps. Due to limited multiplayer aspects at launch, Sony did not require PlayStation 4 users to have a PlayStation Plus subscription to play the game online.


title: No Man's Sky

text: A large update released in November 2016, known as the "Foundation Update", added the ability for the player to define a planet as a "home planet", and construct a base on that planet from modular components created from collected resources. Once constructed, the player can then immediately return to their base via teleportation from a space station in the rest of the galaxy. The base supports building special stations, such as research terminals, that can be operated by one of the sentient aliens, which can help to unlock additional base components and blueprints, tend to harvesting flora for resources, and other aspects. The player may opt to tear down the base and relocate to a different home planet at any time. The player can also deploy devices such as automatic mineral drills in the field. The player is able to purchase large starship freighters, which serve both as a space-bound base, with similar base-building and construction options as the planetary base, and as additional storage capacity that collected resources can be transferred.


title: No Man's Sky

text: The Foundation update adds two play modes, with the original gameplay considered as the third, default mode. Survival mode is similar to standard gameplay but the difficulty is much higher—atmospheric effects have larger impact on the exosuit's armour, alien creatures are more hostile, Sentinels are more alert and deadly, and resources tend to be sparse. If a player should die in Survival mode, they must restart without being able to recover their lost progress, though they still possess their credits, alien language progress, and known blueprints. Creative mode removes much of the mechanics that can kill the player's character, and gives them unlimited resources for constructing bases.


title: No Man's Sky

text: A second update released in March 2017, known as the "Path Finder Update", added several new features to the game. Among these included the ability to share bases with other players, as well as new vehicles called exocraft to help in exploration. The exocraft can be built on the player's set home planet, and called upon on any other planet. The update also contained a permadeath option that wipes the player's progress completely on death; support for Steam Workshop for user modifications on the Windows version; new base building features and materials, ship and multitool classes and support for PlayStation 4 Pro enhanced graphics.