But for now I guess it’s back to the drawing board. If I could teach a mouse how to do data input, I’d make a million. Then the mouse is the next best thing to a pen. I am not convinced that it will, except, of course, when I want to draw pictures. One computer enthusiast wrote in a 1985 newspaper: The mouse is yet another in the long line of computer devices that try to make our work easier and more efficient. To them, it was faster and more efficient than using a mouse on a GUI. The majority of computer users at the time were already used to typing commands and navigating with the keyboard only. Not everyone believed in the future of GUI computing though. It also utilised a simple GUI which gave users drop-down menus, scroll bars, and icons - all of which made computing more user friendly. Microsoft quickly followed suit in 1985 with Windows 1.0. You choose from a menu of commands by simply pressing the wandering mouse's button rather than by using a number of control keys or by entering words. As a New York Times journalist wrote: The fundamental difference between the Mac and other personal computers is that the Macintosh is visually oriented rather than word oriented.

The Mac came with a GUI where, amongst other features, users could magically drag and drop things with a mouse.

In 1984, the launch of the Apple Macintosh signalled that the times were a-changin’. Practically, it meant computer users had to memorise keyboard commands to use the computer there was no such thing as a mouse. Instead, computers had command-line or text-based user interfaces. These two applications held on to the top spots from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, when most computers did not have a graphical user interface (GUI).

1-2-3 was so successful, in fact, that it was seen as the PC’s first ‘ killer app’, leading the charge for the PC revolution in the 1980s.

Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect - not Excel and Word - were the respective market leaders in the spreadsheet and word processing application categories. Pre-1995, however, Office was nowhere near as dominant. In short, Microsoft Office is thoroughly embedded in our digital lives. Cohorts of finance professionals are forced to master Excel. Entire generations of students have grown up with Word and PowerPoint. Today, almost everyone is familiar with Microsoft Office.

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