The Mouse Turns 40

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:Mouses

[ZERO1ZERO]

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see. I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.

And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

Original Source Unknown..

used oscilloscopes years before memory chip

[peter303]

Computer screens as we know them, did not start becoming generally available until the mid 1970s. The breakthrough was an inexpensive memory chip large enough to hold 5 by 7 patterns of ascii characters 5 x 7 x 40 (1400 bits) and 80 x 48 screenfull of characters (19K at 6 bits per character). A bit of memory cost about $1 until Intel introduced the first kilobyte chips in 1970 (two years after Englebert's demo) dropping the bit price to pennies in mid 1970s. Then it became practical to sell character computer terminals. Before then computer users used punchcards, punchtapes, teletypes, and line printers.

These were character screens however. Graphics screens took another 10-15 to become personal. The first generation were programmable oscilloscopes, i.e. vector drawing machines. They had their special graphics languages, e.g. GKS, that emulated pen plotters. Limited bit map grapics came in the meantime. Steve Wozniak is famous for one baroque scheme of graphics in the Apple II. It wasnt pure bitmap as we know today. Xerox PARC sold the first B&W bitmaps at $30K a pop ($120K in 2008$). Then about 1980s the first general purpose color raster screen computers came out. At $30K a terminal these were shared in a lab. That was because a megabyte still cost $10K. Finally as memory prices dropped "workstation"-class computers came out around 1985 giving each scientist their personal graphics screen. This was SUN Microsystems original product.

In 2008 I bought a $7 cellphone with 64K pixel color graphics screen.

Re:Mouses

[OglinTatas]

The poem (and one line in particular) reminds me of a book of essays by Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) called "The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough."
It's been a long time since I read the book, but the style of your poem could easily pass for a Seuss work (though there are uncharacteristic awkward parts in the above example, for example the kiss line).

I'm not saying it is from that book, nor that Geisel wrote it. I believe the book contained his work from his twenties and early thirties. But it might be fun to read that book if you haven't done so.