Only then did Ingalls realize what had happened. In the midst of the edit he had instinctively pressed the middle button of his mouse. As if from nowhere, a small rectangle had appeared on the screen listing several commands. Ingalls had selected “cut” and released the button, whereupon the tiny rectangle instantly disappeared (along with the selected text to be deleted). It was something they called the “pop-up menu,” the forerunner of a device common to almost every Windows or Macintosh program today. “It flashed and disappeared,” he recalled. “That was really a wonderful moment, and it was
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