On the 9th December 1968, Douglas Engelbart brought us the joystick of the future when he used a wooden mouse with one button to select text.
Created for him by Bill English, the mouse was meant to act as an extension of the human hand, with the ‘click’ representing pointing to something with your real hand.
From the humble two-button knock-off right up to the Ā£12,400 diamond encrusted mouse featured here, mice have run alongside the personal computer revolution since Windows 3.1.
Folks in California, of course, are having a day’s worth of celebrations for this landmark event, and you can’t help but wonder what the world of computing would have been like without the invention of this little plastic tool.
But that’s not the only thing that came out of FJCC at that time: video conferencing, full text editing, hyperlinks – the building blocks of the WYSIWYG & GUI we have today.
So, raise a USB to one of the unsung heroes of games, the humble mouse, and his 40 years of toil under our sweaty hands.
Source: BBC via Silent D.
Published: Dec 9, 2008 02:46 pm