On this day, Dr. Douglas Engelbart gave a demonstration of this enhancement for computers at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. How I indirectly thank him practically every day of my life since the late Eighties. The other night, Somara and I were watching the Sixties Batman movie giggling over the Batcomputer which was just a bunch of lights. Same goes for the original Star Trek show. Despite all the other innovations Star Trek inspired such as cell phones (communicators) and jump drives/USB memory sticks (those silly pieces of wood), all it came up with for computers was voice recognition; a technology which still doesn’t reliably work if you’ve had go through a phone tree lately.
Anyway, thanks to Dr. Engelbart’s innovation and Apple making it standard on the Macintoshes in 1984, computers became more practical to me. Before then, they stunk due to all the arcane commands you had to type in. Heck, without mice and a decent GUI, computers didn’t really “solve” much, they felt like an end rather a mean (or a tool).
There’s more details here courtesy of the BBC.