In pest control, we're usually focused on eliminating mice and finding ways to exclude them from homes, restaurants and other businesses across Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. But today, we're honoring a different kind of mouse. That's because 45 years ago today, computing changed with the first computer mouse.

Legacy of the Mouses

Douglas Engelbart, the director of the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, transformed the personal-computer industry by unveiling and demonstrating the first computer mouse on December 9 1968.

Engelbart's demonstration came during the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The 90-minute presentation also featured other new technologies that would transform the computing world. These included hypertext, multiple computing windows and video conferencing. Many of these and other technologies would be incorporated into Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems over the next two decades.