The Mouse Turns 40 169
Smivs writes with an excerpt from the BBC marking the anniversary of what may be the most famous tech demo outside Trinity site: "The humble computer mouse celebrates its 40th anniversary today. On 9 December 1968 hi-tech visionary Douglas Engelbart first used one to demonstrate novel ways of working with computers.
The first mouse that Dr Engelbart used in the demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) was made of wood and had one button.
Much of the technology shown off in the demo inspired the creation of the hardware and software now widely used. ...
The mouse, which was built by Bill English, helped Dr Engelbart demonstrate how text files could be clipped, copied and pasted as well as showing ways of using computer networks to collaborate on projects or co-edit documents." According to the article, "A day of celebration is planned in California to mark the 40th anniversary; with many of the researchers behind the original demo reunited to mark the event."
Re:Obligatory review comment (Score:4, Informative)
P.S. I remember when I first used a PC, I kept wondering why I needed a second button. Back then (Win 3.1) the right mouse button was rarely used. The left button would be well-worn while the right button still looked new. It took a couple years for Microsoft to invent the idea of right-button context menus. (Or maybe that should be stole? The Commodore Amiga had been using right button menus since 1986.)
Re:Mouses (Score:3, Informative)
The English language made a lot of sense when it was still Germanic. It had a logical flow.
Then the damn French took-over the island and English became a multilingual language with contradictory grammar rules. Around the year 1500, the damn pronunciation change. For example: "knicht" was originally pronounced the way it was spelt, and therefore easy to read, but suddenly it became pronounced as "nite". Why? Who the hell knows??? And finally, as if the language wasn't already fraked up, the linguists decided "knight" was the proper spelling because they thought the word came from Greece... even though our Anglo-Saxon ancestors came from Asia, not Greece.
And thus we have a language that is part French, part Greek, part German, follows contradictory rules, and spells words based upon verbal pronunciations ("k-night") that nobody has used for over five centuries.
Yeah.
You'd think someone would come along and say, "Enough is enough" and start spelling English the way it sounds: "Enuf is Enuf".
Re:Obligatory review comment (Score:2, Informative)
curve of constant width [wikipedia.org] Known of since the 1800s at the latest. Oo, found it; this [youtube.com] video is more fun and has been around for almost 50 yrs.