When my 14-year-old son, Patrick, stepped up to the plate during a Colt League baseball game, the young announcer declared, "Now batting, the right fielder, number 12, Pathogen!"
After some confusion in the stands, the announcer came back on over the loudspeaker. "Sorry folks, that's PAT Hogan!"
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. |
