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Just a post to commemorate that 40 years ago today, Douglas Engelbart held The Mother of All Demos (video), introducing concepts such as the computer mouse, hyperlinks and e-mail. Taken for granted today, back in 1968 those were things no one had ever heard of.

Just think, without the mouse, graphical user interfaces probably never would have come off the ground. And what would the Internet be without e-mail and hyperlinks? In my opinion, this counts as one of the pivotal moments in history that made possible the computer as we know it today.

My Logitech MX1000 died this morning. They’re excellent in surviving free falls from half a meter. But accidentally stepping on them kills them, just like it would a real mouse. And that’s exactly what happened this morning. It served me well over the past few years. I did try Apple’s Mighty Mouse for awhile, but its scroll ball stopped working, so I went back to my MX1000.

But now it’s dead. So I needed something new. Something just as comfortable and preferably with the same or even better features.

I went to Logitech’s web site to look at their current line of mice. There, my eyes fell on the MX Revolution. It’s shape is similar to the MX1000. It has all the features the MX1000 has and more. But what appealed to me the most was what Logitech calls the “MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel”.

That thing is amazing! I give the wheel a good swing, and it goes into free spin, like a flywheel. Inside a scroll wheel are ratchets onto which a notch pushes that make it “click”. The MX Revolution has a mechanism that can retract that notch, so the wheel has no more friction and can spin freely.

Scrolling through long documents or web pages (Wikipedia has some good examples) is now blazing fast and super easy. I do fear that the complex mechanism is more sensitive to free falls. So I’ll try to be a little bit more careful with this one.

Here’s a pictures:

Logitech MX Revolution