Wednesday 3 December 2008

One Billion Mice

Logitech has announced that they have manufactured their billionth mouse (in China naturally), I have been working in the IT industry long enough to remember using machines without them and the first time that I came across one back in '85.

That was on an Apple Mac which was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a GUI and a mouse – 23 years later and that interface and a mouse is now the current standard for human computer interaction.

According to industry analysts the day of the mouse may be coming to an end with increasing use of touch pads and screens and other interfaces – while they started with mice Logitech has since diversified and will probably survive.

Nowadays a billion refers to 1,000 million but I grew up when in the UK we were still using the long scale definition which was a million million and it was not until 1974 that we adopted the short scale definition. What surprised me reading the wiki entry is the number of countries (and Quebec) that are still using the long scale definition – guess it makes for an easy ride when meeting the IMF, “oh our national debt is only 2 billion ducats”.

2 comments:

Sezme said...

That's an infestation of mice. ;P

Yeah, ummm...my jokes aren't always all that funny, eh?

DBA Dude said...

rt, It is the number of cats we would have to bring in to control it that bothers me :)