More than anything, Bob wanted to be a cowpoke. Taking pity on him, a rancher decided to hire the lad and give him a chance.
"This," he said, showing him a rope, "is a lariat. We use it to catch cows."
"I see," said Bob, trying to seem knowledgeable as he examined the lariat. "And what do you use for bait?"
Computer mouseIn 1970, a U.S. patent was issued for the computer mouse - an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System” (No. 3541541). The inventor was Doug Engelbart. In the lab, he and his colleagues had called it a “mouse,”after its tail-like cable. The first mouse was a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top. Engelbart had designed this as a tool to select text, move it around, and otherwise manipulate it. It was a key element of his larger project - the NLS (oN Line System), a computer he and some colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute had built. The NLS also allowed two or more users to work on the same document from different workstations. It had been given a public demonstration at a computer conference on 9 Dec 1968. |
