A Tale With A Tail

and he’s a jolly good bar-rel
and he’s a jolly good bar-rel
and he’s a jolly good bar-eh-rel

and he stays with all of us!!

November 17, 1970, American inventor and computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart (1925) got patented a device described as an ‘X-Y position indicator for a display system’, nicknamed the ‘mouse’. And it’s this invention that we’re still using everyday. However, the mouse remained pretty unknown until the appearance of the Mac in 1984. Even on the release of this new computer with a mouse, ‘there is no evidence that people want to use these things’, according to some critic of those days. If we all would click our mouse at the same time right now, it would deafening that critic’s ears, no doubt! I raise my glass to a 39 year old mouse: well done! Image by Photobucket/bipolarbettie