As much as I like using a mouse (or a Mac trackpad - which is so much better than what PCs offer) and as much as it has simplified computing, I still am partial to some of the old command line alternatives or drop down menus/hot keys that could be faster than dragging the stinkin' mouse across a page. (And those 8" floppy drives ruled too! Kidding...sort of.) Either way, the 40th anniversary of the mouse is only days away.
The name was never meant to stick. When Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California designed a computer controller encased in a carved-out wooden block, with wheels mounted on the underbelly, one researcher nicknamed it a 'mouse'. 'We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name,' Engelbart recalled later. 'But it didn't.'
Engelbart's invention became the mouse that soared, an essential piece of computer hardware. Its 40th birthday will be celebrated next week when Engelbart returns to Stanford (now known as SRI International). The mouse was first shown to the world when he gave a presentation of a working network computer system in San Francisco on 9 December, 1968, which is still revered as 'the dawn of interactive computing'.
Yet in one sense Engelbart, now 83, was far ahead of his time. He never received royalties, partly because his patent ran out just before the tech revolution that saw the computer and mouse supplant pen and paper. Now the mouse faces growing competition from a new generation of touchscreens.
