I absolutely guarantee that when you saw my name up there, squeezed between van Gogh and Alexander Fleming you thought who the bloody hell is that but i invented the one thing that you're probably touching right now, the Computer Mouse.Beside creating that thing that we all use every single goddamn day, my role in the personal-computing revolution was huge, contributing to technologies like hypertext, networked computers, and the graphical user interface but it was early on when i was pondering a better way to interact with my computer monitor and using my experience of being a radar operator in the Navy during World War II and used their setup which featured a stylus to move a cursor around the screen.
On our patent i called it 'An X-Y position indicator for a display system' but we needed a more snappier name and i have seen that it is called a Mouse which is an acronym for 'Manually Operated User Select Equipment' but sorry to piss on that particular campfire but i called it a mouse because it's cord looked like a tail or something but thought if it ever became popular then someone would give it a proper name but nobody ever did.
I never received any royalties for the invention, my employer SRI patented the mouse and licensed it to Apple Computer for something like $40,000.
I died of kidney failure peacefully in my sleep but i don't know if anyone tried to revive me by jiggling me, banging me down a few times and repeatedly pressing the space bar.
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