An Unnatural History of the Electronic Mouse
An Unnatural History of the Electronic Mouse — the American Magazine
Technology marches on and the mouse is done for, or so we are told. But what if history had been different?
For fans of technology journalism, it is hard to keep up with the gurus’ ideas of what is obsolete. Surely paper, cash, and television are on their way out, they say.
The latest candidate is the computer mouse and its evolutionary kin, the trackballs, touchpads, and other devices. Way back in 2009, Network World said that touchscreens and voice recognition software would do them in. The Wall Street Journal and Fortune have already proclaimed that the future lies in three-dimensional gestures, literally hand waving. This month, the Washington Post joined in, adding the mouse to technology’s endangered species list.
Mice and keyboards do raise significant health issues. For some people, rotating the hand to operate a conventional mouse, or even typing on a keyboard, may cause carpal tunnel syndrome and other overuse ailments. Some generally higher-priced alternative designs may be healthier. But it is not clear that the conventional mouse or keyboard alone is to blame for users’ ills. For example, in early studies of automated newsrooms, publications using similar equipment had markedly different rates of cumulative trauma disorders — painful musculoskeletal and nervous conditions resulting from repetitive motions or unhealthy positions of the hand and fingers. Workplace stress may play a larger role than variations in hardware or software. Some workers with carpal tunnel syndrome who replaced keyboarding with voice recognition software developed voice overuse issues. It is thus entirely possible that touch- and gesture-based computing will be no healthier than using hardware with conventional interfaces. In fact, medical researchers now consider smartphone screens alarmingly efficient incubators and transmitters of germs.
While we await the actual future of the mouse, we can take a counterfactual view and explore an alternative universe. In reality, the mouse is a surprisingly old device. The interface guru Douglas C. Engelbart first demonstrated it in 1968. The preserved video of his introduction of the mouse-keyboard interface looks uncannily like word processing and Internet email systems of today, even if the display and typography seem relatively crude. His concepts were ready for later developers of graphic interfaces, from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to Apple and Microsoft.
In our parallel world, imagine that compact processors, Wi-Fi, and 4G wireless have developed even more rapidly than they actually have, but that limits on some rare earth elements have severely restricted screen sizes. Suppose, in other words, that smartphones, apps, and the Cloud had arrived before full-sized personal computers. We would have a very different view of progress.