Hard to believe I missed this one.
If the Boidem is going to continue to appear on a more or less regular schedule I'm probably going to have to move my posting dates to the beginning of the month. Posting toward the end of the month makes a certain amount of sense. After posting I can rest (or collect materials) for a couple of weeks - at least until I realize that the end of the month is approaching. There's something about the end, even if it's only of the month, that has an unavoidable finality to it, and this creates the pressure to actually finish writing and post. If I move my posting to around the beginning of the month there's hardly any pressure. And that means that I'll probably find myself resting ... until later in the month when I suddenly feel the pressure again.
If that's the case, however, why would I want to move my posting date toward the beginning of the month? These date tie-ins are a well established tradition, and I don't want to abandon them. But it seems that I'm running out of significant dates that merit the tie-in. Of course lots of things happened on every date, but finding an event that seems fitting for the Boidem is becoming more and more difficult. I seem to be using up those from the end of the month. Were I to move posting to the beginning of the month I'd no doubt be able to tie-in to numerous events that presently haven't been available to me.
Which brings me to this month's tie-in which turns out to be very fitting, and somehow hasn't yet been recognized here. It was sort of on this date, in 1981, that the computer mouse was ...
Wait a second. The mouse is a computer pointing device, and it's common knowledge that Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse. He used one at the Mother of All Demos in December of 1968, and we even have film of him doing that. And he even invented it five years earlier - in 1963. So if that's the case, what's so special about April 27, 1981? A short article in Time Magazine from 2015 explains:
For an innovation meant to make it easier to use a computer, its name was surprisingly unwieldy: “X-Y position indicator for a display system.” The word “mouse” was much catchier, and that’s what the device was eventually called when it debuted as part of a personal computer station, first sold by the Xerox Corporation on this day, April 27, in 1981.
In other words, it was on this day that the mouse, and called as such, was marketed as part of a total package by Xerox.
Which I suppose goes a long way toward explaining why such a significant event succeeded in escaping from me. Wikipedia's entry for April 27 makes note of the event in a manner that seems impressive:
Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.
But ultimately it's far from a truly significant milestone.
Go to: Online knows best?