Antedating of "double click" (verb and noun)

Hugo hugovk at GMAIL.COM
Wed Mar 19 13:43:08 UTC 2014


OK, here's a proper verb (and a noun for good measure).

Byte magazine, August 1981, page 108, The Smalltalk Environment by Larry
Tesler of Apple:

[Begin]
Clicking the button twice with the cursor in the same spot within a word
selects that whole word and highlights it. This special mechanism is
provided because it is very common to select a word. Informal experiments
lead us to believe that double clicking is much easier than drawing through
a word for beginners and experts alike. It is also faster. It takes the
average user about 2.6 seconds to select a word anywhere on the screen
using draw-through, but it takes only 1.5 seconds using the double click
(reference 5).
[End]


Reproduced in plain text on this August 1996 webpage:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/Smalltalk-Byte.htm

And also in the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYTE_06-08_Smalltalk_djvu.txt

Hugo

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