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Walt Zwirko blogs on the mouse anniversary

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As someone who started computing in the era before "pointing devices" became necessary, I've always been a big fan of the keyboard. There are a lot of handy keyboard shortcuts that can cut back on the need for unproductive reach-overs.

The mouse has become so ubiquitous that you don't really miss it until it's not there. The wireless mouse on my living room computer recently stopped working and I had to resort to using Windows' built-in MouseKeys utility to control that little pointer using the arrow keys on the keyboard.

The good news is, MouseKeys works, it's free, and it's something to keep filed away the next time you find yourself mouseless.

But it sure made me miss having a real mouse.

And that brings us to a story from Logitech, the computer accessories manufacturer that this week announced it has shipped its one-billionth mouse, just 23 years after it started selling them.

By way of comparison, the world buys 15 billion batteries every year; the Chinese produce nearly 10 trillion pencils every year.

Logitech's milestone dovetails with the 40th anniversary of the first public demonstration of the mouse (along with a lot of the other technology we now take for granted).

A young scientist named Doug Engelbart hosted the tour-de-force live multimedia presentation at a computer conference in San Francisco on December 9, 1968.

After using the mouse to manipulate words and diagrams on a computer screen for about 25 minutes, Engelbart finally offered a close-up of what it looked like and described how it worked.

"Come in, Menlo Park," Engelbart said, calling for the image from a camera at a Stanford Research Institute lab several miles away. The prototype was a wooden block the size of a large fist; it had two wheels on the bottom to register movement of what he referred to as a "tracking spot" or "bug" on the screen (what we now call the "cursor").

"I don't know why we call it a mouse," Engelbart said. "Sometimes I apologize that it started that way and we never did change it."

On that day in 1968, Engelbart and his associates showed other revolutionary developments that pointed the way to the future, including hypertext (the concept behind clicking on a link that takes you to related information) and the ARPA computer network (which was the precursor what we now know as the Internet).

Remarkably, you can view this entire Stanford Research Institute event — now widely referred to as "the mother of all demos" — at the Google Video Web site.

You can sense the pride and enthusiasm of Engelbart and the other young scientists who showed off the technology they'd been working on since the early 60s.

Take a look at this video if you have a chance. It's in black-and-white, it's most definitely not high definition, and it does often get bogged down in what appears to be technical minutiae. But here you can see the genesis of much of the way we work today.

They are celebrating the anniversary of the dawn of interactive computing with a special event Tuesday, December 9, at the Stanford University Memorial Auditorium. Doug Engelbart, now 83, will be there along with other industry pioneers to discuss their achievements.

It's a living history lesson that can still inspire other great thinkers.

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