An ode to the humble computer mouse — mashable.com

If it had been up to Douglas Engelbart, his invention would have been called the "X-Y position indicator for a display system." That's how the man who designed the mouse described what he'd made in his 1967 patent filing. But "mouse" became early shorthand for the beige box with the wire tail, and the cutesy term stuck. "I don't know why we call it a mouse," Engelbart said in his now-famous public demonstration of the technology on Dec. 9, 1968. "Sometimes I apologize it started that way and we never did change it."

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