Not many people will have heard of Doug Engelbart, even though his recent demise means he was on the news quite a bit over the last few days. However, any writer who has used a PC to capture their words, is likely to have used a package such as Word, Open Office, Libre Office or the equivalent has a lot to thank Doug for.Doug invented the mouse.Doesn't sound like much really does it, but think for a moment, about how intuitive that little device under your palm is. Move the mouse, move the pointer on the screen. Click an icon to select a function, click on a piece of text to jump to it. Highlighting, dragging and dropping... All (most) achievable by remembering a host of multi-key keyboard shortcuts but nothing quite so nice, or as simple, as the interaction you get with a mouse.I started writing on a computer when I got my Commodore 64 back in 1983, I even invested in a proper WYSIWYG Word Processor called GeoWrite which ran under GEOS (effectively a replacement OS for the C64) - but it used the cursor keys to move around and a host of function keys to select, erm... functions. It wasn't until 1989 when I got my Commodore Amiga A500 which came with a mouse and I had yet another investment in a Word Processor called Wordsworth. Wordsworth had fully embraced that potential interaction between words and writer. All the things we now take for granted were there, the icons, the drop down menus, left click to do one thing, right click to do something else. It was a revelation.When I got my first laptop - a HP Omnibook (800CT) it came with a funny little mouse on a stalk that popped out of the side of the machine - it's still possibly the best mouse I have ever used.Now of course, writing this blog on my little Asus Netbook, it has, like pretty much all (non-Touch) portable devices a touchpad and while it's OK, it finds ways to screw me up in ways a mouse never did. I don't think I ever worried about my mouse suddenly doing something odd with the position of the pointer, or misinterpreting a single click as a double. Convenient though the touchpad is I'd still rather be using a mouse.Although we're being dragged into the era of the touch screen, the tablets, phablets (or is it Tones?) the layout of a writer's interaction with the application that collects, collates and structures their words still has a lasting legacy, a tip of the hat, to that initial mouse driven interaction with the computer.Thank-you Doug.