Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Computer Mice

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why computer mice are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Computer mice known for clicking on stuff. Famous for also moving to a next thing to click. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why computer mice are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcasts All About Why Being Alive is More Interesting Than People Think It Is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! He is. What is your relationship to or opinion of computer mice? I know this one.

Back in the day they used to have little pieces of cheese that you would move around inside of the computer and it would lead the mice around a big keyboard so they would type things for you. And that's why they called computer mice show over. You're welcome. We will explain the name of it. And it's just very fun that it's named after mice, which I find wonderful. I know they're a pest, but they're great.

Yeah, they are a pest, but they're great. Yeah, they are a pest, but they're cute. I've owned both mice and mice, computer and flesh. What about the third type of some kind of cyborg, right? It's like half mice, half machine. Yes, I've also owned me ice. But yeah, I remember when they went from the ball type, like with the tracker ball, which I always thought was fun to play with, to the laser one where when you lift the mouse and you look at it, it's like, ah, my eye. And then that one didn't, like, I feel like those laser ones didn't work very well for

a while, like on any kind of irregular surface. And then they started getting better. And now it's all track pads, baby. All track pads playing CS4 Go on track pads, drawing on track pads. I'm 100% track pad. I completely forgot about the early era of optical mice where they just didn't kind of work very well. They didn't work good. You'd be like, oh you used it on a table? That's your first

mistake. And I'm like, I usually mouse on a table. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. No, you need to do it on a perfectly white surface. Or wait, was it the opposite? I don't remember. Yeah, or like some kind of sterilized perfect lab. Yes. Yeah. A frictionless map. And thank you to Prime Suspects on the Discord for suggesting this. It's a wonderful topic, ran away in the polls. And Optical Mice will mostly be the bonus show. Everything else will be the main show. This is going to be really fun. Yes. Nice. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

This week, that's in a segment called, once there was this guy who took all of the numbers and Numbers and compile them into stats and then he would share them on his pod Cast with his co-host Katie Do do do do do do do do he always would explain them because that makes Numbers fun I want the listeners to know because this is an audio medium. Alex did grow facial hair and it was grotesque. I've never seen, it's like, you know, the American werewolf in London, you know, where he's like growing the hair. It's like that, but with a luscious

set of sideburns. Yeah. If there's a full moon or Warren Zvon or this kind of song, I turn into a facial hair wolf. Any of those three situations. Sideburn Wolf. Where are sideburns? If I meet Chester A. Arthur, that's the fourth way. He was a very sideburny president. And that name was submitted by Dangit Bob on the Discord.

Thank you Dangit Bob. We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siffpodatgmail.com. And the first number is $35 US. I'll take it. Thanks. There you go.

If anyone said it earlier than Katie out loud while listening, they get the $35. Dibs. Ah, thanks. And at the end of 2020 for the Wirecutter.com, the reviews site from the New York Times, their top rated computer mouse only costs $35 on Amazon. That's not bad. Which speaks to mice being like a pretty affordable everyday item at this point. Didn't mice used to be made out of like whale ivory or something. Right, Ishmael hunted Moby Dick in order to generate computer mice. This is full of valuable amber grease. Because the very next number here is at least $1,100 US.

And that's an adjusted for inflation to these dollars. Wait, damn it. Oh yeah, somebody definitely beat you. I was too today's dollars. Wait, damn it. Oh yeah, somebody definitely beat you. I was too slow on that. Oh, damn it. I did say it while Katie was drinking water. I don't want you to think Katie's slow on this. You don't have the drop on her usually. Yeah. Yeah. So adjusted for inflation dollars, that was the cost to manufacture a computer mouse at

the start of the 1980s. Wow. Why was it so much? There was no mass production, no economies of scale? Yeah, it was not quite a popular item yet as of 1983. The two main reasons were there weren't a lot of people making and buying mice yet, and they broke pretty quickly, even with the best manufacturing they had at the time. It had a metal ball coated in rubber, was the ball inside the mouse,

and that really easily rolled dirt and dust up into the mouse and broke it. And mouse users had to regularly disassemble and clean their mouse in 1983. I remember popping that ball out, not to clean it, but just to play with it. It was just like, nice free ball. It is. It's like a toy inside a toy when you're a kid.

Yeah. It's great because it's like, yeah, they're computer. It's like when you give a cat a thing and then they're more interested in the box. It's like, here's a mouse. You can explore computers, small child. It's like, here's a mouse, you can explore computers, small child, it's like free ball. Right. This must be just completely foreign

to like younger generations who grew up just understanding the entertainment value of computers because it's like, you know, you, for me as a child when I first was introduced to computers, I found it kind of interesting, but not, you know, it's not like there were games on it. I was just like, oh, okay. Numbers and words and geometric shapes. All right. I guess that's cool. Yeah. And in a small way, mice kind of began computer gaming. Like great games didn't come from mice. But one thing that companies like Microsoft did

is develop games like Minesweeper and Solid Terror, primarily as a way to get people used to mousing and proficient with mousing. Right, right. So it's sort of like it's the Ratatouille phenomenon where the mouse kind of leads us to gaming. Right, we're being controlled by the mouse. Yeah, from under our hat. Yeah, we're being controlled by the mouse. Yeah. From under our hat.

Yeah. We all wear a very tall hat when computing. We're getting mouse-atuied. Yeah. And also some listeners might be too young to have ever had a mouse with a ball in it because they also, as we'll discuss in the bonus, started developing optical mice in the late 1980s. They didn't totally replace them right away, but they've been pretty common for a while. And the key number for

all mice is 1984. Because in 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh computer. And that was the first popular computer that also had a mouse. And that really made mice take off with consumers and lowered the price. Did the mouse come with the computer? Like, computer? Was that just part of the package? Yeah, it was packaged with it. They also sold a Lisa computer before that that had a mouse. It just wasn't as popular. Yeah. But Apple built those first mice that a lot of people used by bundling it with the computer. I see. How much did the entire package cost of the computer and the mouse?

That computer sold for about $2,500. And so in today's money, that's over 7,000. Yikes. Wow. So you were already buying something so expensive, you didn't itemize the cost of a mouse, you just bought it all. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I guess would people buy these for personal use in their homes, or was it mostly say like universities or companies at first buying these? Where did the mouse get popularized first? It was all of the above, yeah. If people have heard the Microsoft Excel show, we talk a little bit about that software popularizing PCs and businesses, but basically the Macintosh and then other IBM computers that imitated it just started having mice as a standard thing. Basically from 1984, computer companies started training users to use a mouse, and that was

just standard. Before were people just using the arrows to use a mouse and that was just standard. Before were people just using the sort of arrows to navigate like a terminal? What was, was that the main thing? Yeah, usually it was like a text-based interface and mice really took off with the graphical user interface. Yes. That we're all just kind of used to. That just means you can click on stuff with a cursor.

And we also have a passif about computer cursors. This stands alone from it, but it's very enriching for it. Eventually, we'll explain the whole computer to you. Right. Just like the end key. Take away one. I don't know what that's for. I still don't know why it ends key. I don't know. I know there are reasons. Tildes. Tildes and you. Oh, Tildes would be a hundred episodes. I'm sorry.

Oh, we can't do it. But yeah, mice pretty much take off because PCs take off. One amazing number there is 1992, because one key source this week is computer scientist Paul Atkinson of the University of Sheffield. He wrote an amazing journal article titled, The Best-Layed Plans of Mice and Men, the Computer Mouse in the History of Computing. I get it. And he says that as late as 1992, the Apple Macintosh user guide devoted its entire first

chapter to using the mouse. That was the title of the chat. There was an entire chapter for this is a mouse, this is the button. It was that much in 1992. I guess that makes sense. Also if you're not used to that, what would you call it? The spatial transposition of I'm moving my hand, which moves a cursor on a screen, and the orientation of your hand is like flat against the table and then on the screen it's like upright, it's vertical.

That seems kind of unintuitive at first. Like I remember when I first started using one of those writing tablets, like the Wacom writing tablets, it was so weird. I could barely do anything because it was like, ah, I'm like drawing over here, but it's popping up over here. And then you just, you get used to it after a while. Yeah, we kind of forget that it's a learned skill because a lot of us, I think especially our generation just started really early on a mouse. Started really young, yeah.

And also touchscreens and like iPads and stuff are kind of one of the first things that didn't push people to use a mouse to use a graphical interface. Like that we're all, we might have lived through peak mouse earlier. Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see the mouse get phased out, if touch screens are just going to become the main thing. I mean, I know I like track pads a lot, because with touch screens, your hand is covering up the screen.

So I don't really enjoy that as much. So maybe they won't go extinct. Maybe we'll always have some sort of element of a mouse. But I don't know, maybe at some point it's just going to be all touch screens. Yeah, it could really go either way. If somebody's listening in five years, I would love for you to know more than us. That's exciting. Alex, we're still going to be alive in five years, I hope. Oh yeah. I just mean this time capsule of what we think now, but we'll be around.

Yeah. It could be us talking to past us. You fools. You should have saved all the mice. They're worth a fortune. One more fun number about mice and culture and them being surprising is November 1986. November 1986 was the premiere of the movie Star Trek IV The Voyage Home. 1986, that's just a couple years after Apple really starts popularizing these. And Star Trek IV has maybe the most famous joke involving a

computer mouse. Because in the movie, the crew of the Starship Enterprise, they're in the future, but they go back in time to 1986 because they need to bring humpback whales to the future. It's a very serious plot that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It's a funny movie. It's good. But in one scene, the genius ship's engineer Montgomery Scott, he finds a computer store and tries to use its technology to help them get to the present and do stuff. There's a joke where he picks up a computer mouse and says,

hello computer into the mouse, like it's a microphone. That's fantastic. It's funny because I don't know how true these stories are, but I have heard things where it's like a young kid who's really used to say a tablet will pick up a book and kind of swipe at the pages or tap at the pages before realizing the flipping motion. It sounds a little apocryphal. It sounds a little bit like one of those truthy things, but I can see it with a very young child who's like

first gets introduced to tablets and then gets introduced to books. And then they're like, how does book work? I'm clicking on page. These jokes about technology, like they change meetings so fast as technology changes. And that joke is weird because back in 1986, the joke was that you could control a computer with your voice at all. Yeah. And he just picked up the mouse to do it. But today we specifically find it funny that he thought a mouse is a microphone.

Yeah. Talking to your machine, you can talk to Siri all the time. Now don't say your name. Now everyone's. Alexa, Cortana. Oh, I'm ruining. It's just a Y2K event. The whole world shuts down.

Buy 1000 rolls of double ply toilet paper. So yeah, so that has kind of changed. In that same scene when Scotty's looking at a computer, he just picks up a mouse and tries to use it as a microphone. But then he specifically- That's a solid joke, by the way. Good job, Star Trek. The movie's legitimately funny and very good. I know I poked fun at the whales before.

So in that scene, Scottie treats the mouse as some kind of advanced technology, but calls the keyboard of the computer quaint. And that's because this is being written by people in 1986. So keyboards have been around a long time and mice are new. And so Scottie, even though Scottie would not see them as different levels of technology, if he was really from the future, people in 1986 did? Yeah. I mean, it is really interesting to see the projections of the future from the past and then the ways in which it's accurate, which is that, yeah, we

can talk to computers now. And the ways in which it's not accurate, like, oh, keyboards. By the time you can talk to computers, keyboards are going to be quaint. It's like, now we're still stuck with QWERTY guys. Yeah, so many elements are just legacy or, or reinvented. It's all kind of a patchwork. And speaking of ways things could have gone, the next number is 1992.

We return again to 1992. That's when a few different companies tried to build a computer mouse that is also a phone. Turns out Scotty's idea was inspirational. Do you think that, did they actually get that idea from the Star Trek movie or is there just no way to know? It seems like they probably didn't because there's other logic that they used for this and then people just didn't, because there's other logic that they used for this. And then people just didn't like it. Well, yeah, because like if you're trying to do a phone call on the mouse, and then

you have to use the mouse, it's like, oh, hang on a minute, Cheryl, and then crrrr, as you're like grinding it against the desk. Right. Yeah, the ball sounds like the Indiana Jones boulder. It's just huge. Yeah, in 1992, shout out Canada, a Canadian tech company called Curtis International built the Tela Mouse. Oh, what's this all about? And we'll link pictures. The source is an amazing research blog called TDM.co.

It's written by Ernie Smith. The telemouse had a complete set of office phone buttons on the top of it and a speakerphone speaker. I mean- So like where your palm rests, there's an entire phone interface. Yeah, because then you can't phone while you are on your... It's an, you know, you guys really knocked it out of the park with like, with maple bacon and those all your donut innovations, but maybe, maybe not this one.

Yeah. They weren't the only company within a few years of that. Micron Technologies patented a mouse that unfolds into an entire telephone handset. Dell computers researched this, Samsung researched this. Curtis was only a little bit ahead of its competitors. Why were they so fixated on turning the mouse into a phone. That's strange to me. That's like, oh, let me turn my shoe and do a TV remote. I don't really understand what the logic is there. I love that as a comparison because they asked a normal question but didn't think of any of the normal answers. Their normal question was workers will want to take phone calls from the same desk where they're operating

a PC. They'll want to do phone calls and a PC. Yes, while they may be operating that PC. Exactly. You know, with the mouse. So one of the many better answers is to just put a computer and a phone on the desk. Yeah. They just get a big enough desk or a small phone. And also phones ended up getting a lot smaller really fast.

Why didn't they do tiny phones? Like a little tiny, like little doll-sized phone you could hold up to your ear. Yeah, there's a good gif of Will Ferrell doing that in an SNL sketch. He has like a funny wig on and then a mega tiny cell phone. I'll try to find it. Yeah, there's a good gif of Will Ferrell doing that in an SNL sketch. He has like a funny wig on and then a mega tiny cell phone. I'll try to find it. Anyway. So yes, everybody just did that. But a lot of companies thought the answer is to turn the mouse into a phone.

It's almost like they said, people will want to use a TV remote while wearing shoes, but you could just do both of those things. You don't need to turn it into one thing. Yeah. I think there was a period of time where we were trying to turn things all into one thing. Yeah. And then it just didn't take off with customers basically. They built it and it worked, but nobody wanted it.

Yeah. It kind of makes a lot of sense that no one would want that. Right. I extremely can't imagine it at all. So yeah. No. And then we have a last set of numbers here with the mouse. It's 500 actions per minute. 500 actions per minute is an estimate of an average professional gamer's playing speed in StarCraft 2. Oh. That they can make 500 actions with their mouse and keyboard per minute. That's a lot of actions per minute.

Are they so like the average StarCraft player is doing that? Yeah, or else they're doing something so strategically amazing they don't need to. Are we talking about averages in all StarCraft players or averages in professionals? Professionals. Because I'm certain. Yeah. Okay. I think my speed in StarCraft is like one action a minute and then I'm like, wait, what's the Zerg?

Do I like those guys or not? I'm still behind on what they are. Yeah Yeah Pylons, what's the pie? Oh, I'm dead. Oh no NBC News covered this a few years ago and interviewed a product manager for the eSports League Intel Extreme Masters and He said most professional Starcraft 2 players can achieve at least 500 actions per minute. Each action is somebody using a mouse button or keyboard button to do input, some kind of thing. I know when I was sort of paying attention to it like 10 or so years ago, there's like

a ton of like sort of professional StarCraft stuff. Is that still a major part of professional gaming StarCraft or has it all moved to League of Legends and Fortnite? I'm not really sure. It's pretty much what you said. It's moved to those other games and there's still some people professionally doing StarCraft. NBC News, they compare the action speed in StarCraft to the speed of a pitch in baseball. Yeah. Because basically, if someone can throw harder or click faster, that's useful, but it also

isn't a one-to-one thing where it means they're better at the game. Yeah. Because there are pitchers who throw slowly and fool batters other ways. Right, right. You would need a really rapid reaction speed, but then also strategies. So yeah, I mean, I think it's a very interesting, I don't watch it actually.

I mean, I like computer games, but I definitely see the appeal of professional gaming and watching professional gaming. Kind of like chess combined with, I don't know, aliens. That's cool. Yeah, it seems fun. And my favorite part about learning about this click speed thing is that apparently some players try to juice their click speed in like a tryout or audition situation.

Juice their click speed. How do you juice your click speed? Because I want to do this too. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have said juice. It's not substances, but they... No, let's keep it at juice. Gave her juice. NBC interviewed Matt Weber, who's director of operations for Team Liquid, the online eSports

community. The juice still works in this situation. The juice is liquid. And he said that a lot of players have been known to just spam extra clicks when they're being judged on their performance. So like, they'll do like 10 clicks that are where nine of them are redundant for one action, while they're thinking with their head about the next action. That's been kind of a challenge for people rating players because it's hard to tell in

the moment or without a lot of re-examining the footage if a player is actually making useful actions or not because people have prioritized it. There's a lot of like, I don't know if we're going to talk about this later, but just the sort of ways in which when you try to use mouse input as a proxy for you are doing work. So easy to game. There's like mouse jigglers, mouse clicker, you know, just like, hey, if you're going to judge my performance based on something stupid, like the mouse moving, I will just figure out a way to automate the mouse moving and then make sure I make all my deadlines, which I think is completely fair.

If you've got an employer who's like, I only care about how much you're jiggling your mouse, it's like, okay, as long as I make my deadlines on my stuff, I'm going to use a mouse jiggler otherwise. That's amazing. It's like, okay, as long as I make my deadlines on my stuff, I'm going to use a mouse jiggler otherwise. That's amazing. We have one last number here, which is May 2024. May 2024 is when Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees for using devices or apps to simulate cursor movement on their computer.

Free the jiggle mouse dozen. Yeah, I'm not going to go to the protest. I'm going to use a simulator to make it look like I was there. I'm busy. But yeah, we mentioned that kind of thing on the computer cursors episode. And then since then, there's been a case of Wells Fargo announcing without giving much detail that they fired more than a dozen employees for using mouse jigglers. They didn't give detail because they don't want to say

how they surveilled this or figured it out or judged it. But not only are companies opposing that kind of thing, it seems like they're maybe not even checking if it matters or not. They're just draconianly firing. Yeah. I honestly think that this means that just everyone should use jigglers, like whether or not that they're even, you know, because just I'm just so offended by the idea of a company using the mouse moving as a metric for work. It seems that any kind of metric should be like, are you getting your work done? And are you like, I don't know what these employees were doing, but it's just like, say, you know, have you

completed X number of tickets? Or have you done this thing? And then if it's like, if they've done their work fast and efficiently, and then they have extra time, let them go do their laundry. Why do you care? Right. Exactly. Yeah. And also I feel like a mouse jiggler is a pretty fair response to dystopian surveillance software from your boss. Yes. Like what it like? Yes. Not like they're being cool. So yeah. Yeah. So that's the way that is.

Jiggle your way to freedom, workers. Seize the means of jiggling. Yeah. Or jiggle the means of productioniggling. Yeah. Yes. Or jiggle the means of production. I don't know which is better. Jiggle the means of production. That's so good. I want that on a shirt.

Can we make that happen? Just a hammer with cartoon waves around it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the very future of mousing. Oh, and with StarCraft, they added a new patch to StarCraft to patch 1.4.3, adds a measurement called effective actions per minute with a goal of only measuring clicks that were new

activities in the game and not just pointless extra input of a previous action. So that seems good. That seems fair. For a game where the point is we're measuring your aptitude at the game, that's totally fair. Otherwise, I feel like the dystopian mouse surveillance is ridiculous. Yeah, the StarCraft thing is preventing a pitcher from doctoring the baseball or something. That's good. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's all kinds of numbers about the mouse. And now we have some takeaways about it, starting with takeaway number one. NASA funded the invention of the computer mouse. Oh, good old NASA sending us to the moon. Or are they? I believe so. Inventing computer mice.

Or did they? Somebody's going to listen to this and then Apollo 17 and be real confused. They're going to not understand our deal. I think it'd be fun to be the first sort of conspiracy theorist who's like, no, they did the moon landing, but mice aren't real. They don't exist. Those are all fake. Like when you move a mouse, they use a satellite to track your mouse movement and then send messages to someone remotely who then moves the cursor for you on your computer. That is my conspiracy theory. The mouse actually does nothing, but they're surveilling your use of the mouse and then sending messages

to some guy who then remotely operates your computer. Yeah. And he's a lizard for some reason. He is a lizard for some reason. The box is a baby lizard, that little machine that you call a mouse. It's gecks. It's a bunch of gecks. It's a gecks. Shout out Dana Gould, friend of the show.

Continue with the actual information. Alex? Mice came out of a set of experiments by two computer scientists and it came from a grant paid for by NASA that they were able to do it. So NASA is why we have the mouse. And they funded this in the middle of the space race. Like NASA had a lot of things they were trying to spend money on and they also funded this. Seems like they should be getting royalties then, right? Like mouse royalties, every time you click, they get like a cent. Man, our space program will be amazing.

That's the real StarCraft, am I right? There we go. There is a lot of like, I thought that NASA did a lot of funding of like say technology that then gets used in private industry. That's a constant benefit of the US space program, yeah, which is pretty cool. Yep. This is one of them. The key sources here are that previously cited journal article by Paul Atkinson, also a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Valerie Landau, piece for the New York Times

magazine by Pagan Kennedy, and a book titled 1968 Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution and Change that's edited by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Mark Aaronson. And if people have heard the episodes about computer keyboards or computer cursors, we talked about a computer scientist named Douglas Engelbart. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a tech demo in San Francisco at a conference. And it's been retroactively called the mother of all demos because it changed all of computing history. He presented the first versions of a graphical user interface, hypertext links, collaborative

editing of documents, mapping routes with a computer, planning journeys with a computer. He also did that with a new kind of computer keyboard and the first ever mouse cursor operated by the first ever mouse. Wow. One show, all of that. I see. So what I'm, did you send me a photo of this? I want to see.

Yes, you did. It's like this wooden cube with a wire attached to it and then a little red. Is that a button or a lever? It's one button. Yes, basically a wooden block with one red button on the top. Kind of sticking up. This is so janky and cool. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. And apparently people loved the janky and cool look of it as it was being developed. And we don't know who, but one of Engelbart's colleagues said the prototype, quote, looks

like a one-eared mouse. That's why it's called a mouse. Like, modern ones don't look like mice really, but that one did to some extent. I guess now they don't because they're wireless, but they used to have like a tail. Yeah, cord tail, yeah. Honestly, this one sort of looks less mouse-like in some ways because it's more of a cube, whereas like more modern mice have that sort of rounded body that I could see being mouse-like. Yeah, and the number there is 1987.

A design firm called IDEO developed the first ergonomic mouse where it's shaped for a human right hand. That's pretty much how they have looked ever since. Was Engelbart's hand just very square, maybe? It's like, I don't know, this fits me fine. He has these two block hands. Yeah, he's a Minecraft person. Yeah, he's a Minecraft person. Yeah, Steve from Minecraft.

I like this mouse. So that device amazes people because the cursor is new, the pointer and also the mouse and everything. And a ton of people in tech such as as Steve Jobs, either attended the demo or visited the labs of the people working with Engelbart, so the idea spreads everywhere. How did all this happen? What led to a mouse? It started with Engelbart in 1951, a decade and a half earlier. Apparently Engelbart had an epiphany because he had just proposed to his future wife. She said yes. He realized, hey, I grew up poor in Oregon, served in World War II, put myself through a PhD at Berkeley.

I now have a good wife and a good job. His job was working for NACA, N-A-C-A, which was the predecessor to NASA. He said, now that I have everything, what can be like the best net good for humanity that I can do? Wow. And he came up with computer mice instead of say like the best brownie recipe that'll blow your socks off. Wait, I'm not saying this judgmentally. Yeah, he came up with an entire philosophy of seamless and intuitive computing that augments humans. And the mouse was one tool in the whole toolbox of that.

So he's already thinking of like, in the future, we're going to operate computers with our mind. We're going to like be cybernetic people where computers, the border between computer and man is indistinct and we're going around playing mind sweeper as we're sleeping. I think that's, he's a visionary. I wonder if he did have a brownies recipe though. Angle brownies? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's... Oh man. What if it was brownies, but it was all angles? Because I love the corner pieces. And one sprinkle on top and his friend's like,

that looks like a mouse. And he's like, darn it. And other things of mouse. Geez. Wait a minute. Wait, so did he have a moment where he had the inspiration for a mouse? Was there sort of something that created that thought or was he just kind of sitting and thinking all the time about what can I do to make computing more intuitive? Yeah, it was the broader mission of let's make all of computing more intuitive, which leads to all these things like graphical interfaces and hyperlinking and a predecessor of the internet. And then apparently when he was in school at Berkeley working on an electrical engineering PhD, he made some notes about an idea for an XY position indicator.

X and Y being vertical and horizontal coordinates. Right, the axes of a grid. Yeah, and he basically came up with if you had some kind of item that a person is moving with two wheels in it, like a horizontal wheel and a vertical wheel, the wheels can give input and then that can respond to a cursor on a screen. Oh, that's interesting. Right. And then- It's a good idea. Because I guess I kind of want to ask how does the roller ball even work on a mouse?

It's just tracking the movement of, I mean, I guess it's a sort of omnidirectional movement, not just in X and Y axis. But yeah, like the ball rolls, and then as the ball rolls, what's it doing? It's nudging something? Yeah, exactly. It's just giving both those inputs at once and in a smoother way. Right.

And then the optical mice, there's a light and then a light detector, and the light detector tracks where the light's going. Right, right. That's it. That logical progression from like XY two wheels to like omnidirectional ball to optical laser that hurts your eye when you flip over the mouse. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, right. Eye damage, very important. Yeah.

And so, yeah, Engelbart later on moves on to a lab at Stanford and works at Stanford. And he finds a lot of his colleagues are doing stuff that could move a cursor. Like they try to make light pens or tracking balls or other gadgets that can move a cursor around a tech screen. And he applies for a grant, which NASA gives him in 1963 to test new hardware for moving a cursor. And then one thing they build is the mouse. NASA funded it. So where do you know any of the like failures? Like did they try like a computer hamster and then a computer squirrel and those just didn't really work. A vole in England mostly or Redwall, I don't know. Yeah.

Computer shrew. My favorite weird one is takeaway number two. to the runner up design idea to a computer mouse was a cursor mover operated by the user's knee. Oh, that's what this picture is. I knew that was so I knew this was human flesh and I was really confused about what was going. This looks a little bit like a torture device or possibly a lie detector test or something. Okay, so that's a knee. Good to know. And it is connected to a device that does look like it's about to do some kind of awful surgery. Yeah, you put your knee basically up into a upside-down stirrup under the table And then your knee moves that around and that gives input for where the cursor should go in two dimensions

More than you would think they were pretty into it. Yeah When I want to use a computer, I definitely want it to seem like a gynecological visit. That is good vibes all around. The teams doing this were pretty much exclusively men, so they also didn't have that connection. It was men in the mid-century, so they were like, I don't know. It's too bad because then maybe it would be like, hey, because you go to gynecological exams, you have a lot of computing experience. Yeah.

Turns out Engelbart and another engineer invented several ways to move a cursor on a screen, including the mouse. Key sources are everything we cited, also the research blog, cybercultural.com. When Engelbart gets this funding, he's able to bring in help. He brings in a Stanford colleague named Bill English, who is the other inventor of the mouse, Bill English. So Engelbart just finds his notes from his student days and says, Bill, do you want to just build this hardware?

And so Bill does. He puts the two wheels on it, he puts one button on the top, he hollows out a wooden block to do it. And then there's two machines called potentiometers tracking the wheel movement. In general, they're done building from there, but they were also not overwhelmingly confident in it. They built several pieces of hardware. And one of them was a joystick. One of them was a joystick. One of them was a rudimentary tablet and pen called a Graphicon. They also set up a light pen.

Light pens are sort of like the light guns in games like Nintendo's Duck Hunt for the original Nintendo. They built all these different pieces of hardware and then they ran a good trial. Their trial was they set up one computer attached to all of the options, like all spread out on a table, and then they asked people to try using the computer and just saw what they liked. Oh nice. Yeah. And so most people chose the leg stirrup. Most people chose the mouse and the close second place option was the leg stirrup. We're so weird.

Very normal stuff like joysticks and tablets, not as popular as the leg stirrup. I think maybe it's because deep down we're all horse people and we want to feel like we're riding a horse. And we also will have pictures of it linked, especially at a Douglas Engelbart fan website because that exists. It's great. Really exciting. We were this close to everyone having thick thighs or at least one thick thigh when you

did a lot of gaming. And gaming is a good example. There's one strong reason that they could have picked the leg stirrup. And especially because this is before people mouse and before there's graphical interfaces, computers are mostly text. Right? And so you're just changing the cursor on your text. If you're using a keyboard, having both hands free is cool. Yeah. And if you're mousing, one hand is occupied, the knee is available and you can type with

both hands if you use your knee. It almost makes more sense than a mouse. I mean, I do some hobby pottery and definitely like you use the, it's the same thing for sewing too. Like you use a foot pedal because if you use a hand pedal, one of your hands, you need both your hands on that clay constantly and evenly, otherwise it's going to get messed up. So the foot pedal makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, perfect parallel. And so yeah, this trial did point Engelbart in English to using the mouse, but a knee was a close second. And if they had just kind of overruled their own trial, they could have picked the knee stirrup and that could have been a whole branch of computing technology. But they just didn't and mice are popular. What about mouse shoes? It's actually a very good idea.

I think they didn't want to court it, but we don't have to. So yeah, that's great. Yeah. Mouse shoes, guys. Get on that. Calling all nerds, mouse shoes. Guys, get on that. Calling all nerds mouse shoes. Yeah. Free idea. Folks, while you use that free idea, we're going to take a quick break and then come back with a couple more mouse takeaways. Have you been looking for a new podcast all about nerdy pop culture?

Well, I have just the thing for you. Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries! Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries is a weekly pop culture history podcast hosted by me, Host Alston. And me, Host Brenda. We've already tackled mysteries such as what happened to the puppets from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, is Snoopy Mexican, and why do people hate Barney so much? From theme parks to cartoons to 80s, 90s, and 2000s nostalgia, we tackle it all.

Check us out every Tuesday on MaximumFun.org and wherever you get podcasts. One thing we all have in common, we all have a mind. It makes me so scared because I'm like, when is the bad thing going to happen? And minds can be kind of unpredictable and eccentric. Everybody wants to hear that they're not alone. Everybody wants to hear that someone else has those same thoughts. Depresh Mode with John Moe is about how interesting minds intersect with the lives and work of the people who have them.

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Oh, well, did he do a science clubhouse where he's like only people named Angle Barts allowed and then nobody was named Angle Barts so no one could join? Like, how did he alienate people? He did have a passionate but exclusionary vision of computing. I see. He thought it should not be easy. It should be for people who have treated it like an art form or a craft and learned as much as they possibly can about how to exceptionally use a computer.

I see. So he was pretty gatekeep-y. Yeah. And this is quick because parts were in previous episodes, but it turns out part of the reason that we use mice as a dominant part of a graphical interface is that Douglas Engelbart felt the opposite way, but made everybody mad. So people just did the easier thing. If his personality was different, we might compute differently.

His stubbornness was both a way to innovate, to create this mouse and stuff that actually made it more like, ironically, I feel like that made it more accessible to more people, which is not what he wanted. He wanted it to be some kind of exclusive computer artisanal computing. Yes. Yeah. And additional sources here are an Oral History of the Computer Mouse by author Adam Fisher and also a piece for the Atlantic by Adrian LeFrance. Engelbart thought the ideal computer user is what he called an intelligence worker. And he wanted them to be capable of entering 50,000 different commands by text into a computer. He compared the task and the craft of computing to learning the violin or learning to weave textiles. And no one wanted to do

that. I would be so screwed because I tried learning the violin twice. Didn't take. So I'm glad that computers aren't as hard and as terribly unpleasant when you're learning it as the violin. Yeah, exactly. Because his vision is the mouse is an extra way to brilliantly operate this computer that you have studied like a monk. And everyone else said, what if it's a graphical user interface and the mouse is kind of the main way you

do it. Like the keyboard's mostly for data, typing words, typing web addresses. Otherwise you're mostly just mousing. Yeah. Cause that's a lot easier. You can pick it up very quickly. He does seem like a real innovator, but that, that idea that no, it had, we have to make it somewhat purposefully inaccessible because I only want true artists to use the computer. It's an interesting perspective. I believe there's like a really interesting documentary about it called Ratatouille. And time ego Bart. Yeah, is frowning at everyone. Because it wasn't totally elitist, like Engel

Bart wants computers to augment humanity. So theoretically, you need to maximize your computing skill for maximum augmentation. Like he's not just a jerk or something. But right, he's incredibly zealous about this in a way that angers everybody else. One person it annoys is Bill English, the co-inventor of the mouse. He leaves Engelbart's team. Xerox hires him and he leads a team to build one of the first personal computers. Then most other people quit Engelbart's team to work at Xerox or Apple or Microsoft because Engelbart is also a bad manager. Having that strong, very, I don't know, cult-like personality sometimes works. Steve Jobs managed to leverage his antipathy in order to build this cult-like, slavish following.

But yeah, I guess you got to have some finesse with it. Maybe it's the black turtleneck. Maybe Engelbart just was missing the black turtleneck, to be honest. Yeah, Jobs is pretty much the perfect opposite. Jobs didn't build so much of the stuff himself and led very effectively. Some of it was rude or cruel maybe that I've heard about the leadership, but it's still like led. It made the things happen.

And Engelbart just drove people away. The irony, right, about maybe being really creative, being an artist, being really passionate, that can also mean you just don't want to work with other people or listen to other people. But I mean, it's also an interesting idea because I think that in some ways he may be – there's a grain of truth in his gatekeeping-ness, right? Because the idea of using computers in a way that's really mindless and not getting proper training, right? Like, especially now where people get a lot of information from online or from computers or now AI, right? Without

any proper training of how to sift through, say like, I know this is maybe somewhat far afield from computer mice, but AI is like sort of our, I feel like right now in the zeitgeist, it is the mouse of today, right? Because this is like this new technology that everyone's kind of starting to use. Scottie would talk into it if you're making the movie. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you can also do that.

So it's not... No, no. Well... But it is, I don't think it's necessarily a bad, just as computer mice, I don't think we're bad technology. I don't think that AI is necessarily a bad technology, but the way it's being used is sort of this like marketed as this like, oh, you just ask AI what to do and it'll give you the good answer. And it's like, no, you would kind of have to be

trained, I think, to use it in any way. If you're an expert in something and you're using AI to generate a bunch of various ideas, you already know like, oh, this is false, this is false. Oh, this one might be interesting. Right? And it's the same thing with doing research online, right? If you know how to research and you know how to say read papers or go through articles and see sources, the internet's a really useful tool for research. But if you don't have that training, then you go on to like www.crabsourleadership.com and then you get a lot of weird information. So I can kind of see Engelbart's point. ourleadership.com and then you get a lot of weird information.

So I can kind of see Engelbart's point. I think he, it sounds like he took it too far and it's more just that you should get some depth of training in order to use a computer, not to make it inaccessible to only the artisans, but to make it so that everyone has a richer experience using computers, a richer understanding of it it so they get more out of it. Exactly. Yeah. Also, people will say like,

oh, I wasted time on the computer or wasted time on my phone. If it was harder to use, it might feel less wasted. You know what I mean? It's so easy to use, you feel like you're just goofing off. I've installed apps on my phone to stop me from using apps. Like this is the point we've reached where it's like here's it's so easy to use help. Here's an app to make it harder for me to use an app so I don't use that app.

I've I've taken a break from social media and I'm so happy. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's going really well. Because the last Engelbart thing here, along with having a well-intentioned but wrong belief about the mouse, he executed probably the two worst well-intentioned management strategies I've ever heard of and really drove his employees away with them. One is that Engelbart recognized that he was an engineer with no training in management or leadership. That's a good insight about yourself. And so then he tries to teach himself through books. But his first and biggest choice for a leadership book is the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao.

Oh, well, that's a choice. That's an interesting decision. Maybe there would be transferable stuff, but apparently nothing in it made him a better manager. And allegedly, he would sort of creep out subordinates because they'd be working on a computer hardware or software problem and he'd bring up Mao Zedong, the leader of communist China. And mid-century Americans were like, what are you doing? Yeah. I think you got to ease people into Mao, right? You got to be like, hey, you working on that mouse? Working on that mouse? Oh no. Speaking of mouse, like, gee, that doesn't work.

And then he did an even worse idea too, which is that he has another good insight. He says, I don't have to take on all the leadership training and thinking myself, I can hire a management consultant. Huh? Oh myself, I can hire a management consultant. Huh? Oh no, did he hire Mao? Right. And Mao's like, I'm in the middle of the great leap forward, but I can block some time, I guess.

Okay, sure. So he brings in a management consultant. On its own, that's a good idea. But he chooses a consultant named Werner Erhard. And I had never heard of Werner Erhard. When you Google him, it gets wild. Because the most recent stuff is trouble with the IRS and things. But at the time, he hires Erhard and Erhard says, great. What I do is emotionally intense sessions of something I call attack psychology. So we'll do that to all your employees. Oh, it's a cult. Oh no, it's a cult now. Oops.

Precisely. It turns out it's all made up. That's like the, isn't that the cult that rhymes with shmientology's technique of like breaking people down? Brian Apparently he and Shmientology have a rivalry, partly because they have similar methods. Tawny Oh, okay. It's like, hey, stop stealing my emotional abuse tactics. Brian Exactly. Erhard was trying to break the spirits

of Engelbart's employees in order to funnel them into Erhard's cult. This was such iconically terrible choices of leadership books and management consultants. I don't know how you mess it up that bad. Yeah, I feel like if you go full in on the... all right, first of all, Mao, Mao Zedong, and then secondly, a sort of Scientology analog. Yeah, it's, I don't think that's like, I think there's a lot easier ways to gaslight your employees. Yeah. Not saying you should. I'm just saying.

Right. It can be less roundabout. Exactly. Yeah. There was, I mean, I think there was like this period of time where there was this like, and maybe this was around, this was in the 80s, right? 70s into the 80s, yeah. Yeah, I think this is the same kind of period of time where there was this whole industry of like, hey, you can mind control your employees if you read this book. There are still, I forgot the name of it, which is probably good so we don't get harassed, but there are still these business programs, and maybe it's from the probably good so we don't get harassed. But there are still like these

business programs and maybe it's from the same guy, I don't know, but where like I remember someone came to me saying like, I got invited to this like business retreat, but it seems kind of weird. And then they sent me the website and I was like, Oh yeah, that's a cult. Like that's just cool stuff. Because it's like, yeah, like they would have like, like, like, you know, grilling sessions where we really delve into your psychology and this group thing. It's like, oh, no, no, that's cult, my friend. That is a cult. Yeah. And all Engelbart's employees were like, why don't I just work at Microsoft instead? That would be nice. They don't have a cult leader or the little red book over there.

They're just building windows. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he really went too extreme on it. Yeah. Speaking of especially like culture and gender, we have one last takeaway about the computer mouse because takeaway number four, computer mice led American businessmen to stop seeing computers as feminine.

Okay, why? The first computers in business, besides like mainframes and stuff, were seen as similar to the typewriters used by female typists. If you imagine a madman type office where there's a lady's typing pool, they were seen as, oh, this is a higher tech typewriter and still feminine. And then the mouse let men feel like more of a lord using a computer. It's like I'm touching a boob. It's like I'm holding a booby. Because I've got my hand on it and I'm moving it around just like a man does with a boob. It really is like almost a mental picture thing or a visual thing.

In especially the mid-century, there were entire groups of highly skilled women who did typing work. Because typewriters jam all the time. It's hard to type fast. century, there were entire groups of highly skilled women who did typing work. Because typewriters jam all the time, it's hard to type fast. It takes actual training and it is really skillful. The idea was that these women do this grunt work typing keys while a few men supervise them and have all the ideas and sit at a desk and think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The best pop culture connection is madmen. Every

madman situation, a woman bringing ice to a man and then typing. Yeah. And so on the past SIF about Excel, we talk about businesses adding personal computers for spreadsheets. The other reason that computers really break into offices is the mouse. Because in the mental picture of a businessman thinking, taking calls, being somewhat leisurely and not hunched over a keyboard, a mouse fit. A man could be on the phone with one hand and mouse with the other hand and be still in charge and not so feminine according to mid-century American culture. It's just so stupid. God, it's just so stupid.

It's very stupid. It's like, you then see women drinking water and it's like, aha, I must only have gin now. All right. Die of liver disease because it's too feminine to drink water. I feel like that really happened with vegetables. They were like maximum one sprig with my two pound steak. One sprig.

I mean that is, when you say that, when you said that happened, it's currently, if you've seen these things where it's like men are like, oh, I can't have a vegetable. I have to eat raw, bold testicles because that's what men do. That shirtless guy on the internet. Yeah, right. With the beard. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

There's multiple ones, but that's, yes. I mean, I think that's always kind of a funny thing because like when you, especially when we think of things that last, right? Like because now I don't think that persists. The idea of typing on a keyboard is feminine, but there's certainly a lot of these things that do persist and we're like, oh, that's probably biology. Because women, of course, women like dresses just biologically. And it's like, well, but yeah, there was a period of time where we thought that gripping a mouse was maybe the most masculine thing one could do.

Right. Like your appearance is not a typist. You are doing different input into the computer. And so there was this whole cultural wave in America. And I think people know today now both the mouse and keyboard are pretty androgynous and maybe even too much tilted toward being male where women get discriminated against in tech. But that was a significant change and the mouse kind of accidentally caused that. That certainly wasn't on Douglas Engelbart's mind. Yeah. On his mind was more like, how do I break down and rebuild my employees into my image?

Right, right. Big red flags everywhere and that's a literal red flag and so you're out. If the ego of a man is dissolved, can it be reformed? Meanwhile, there are people like, I want to hold a mouse so I feel like a man. Wild times. It's fun if you have your own ideas and a weird cult leader because then all the management suggestions are like, destroy spiritsits or Casual Fridays. It's two very different buckets of ideas. Right.

Taco Tuesday wedged between like a quizzing session where you are forced to moo like a cow for an hour. That's computers, baby. Anyway. That's computers, baby. Anyway. That's computers, baby. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, NASA funded the invention of the computer mouse. Takeaway number two, the runner-up design idea to the computer mouse was a cursor mover operated by the user's knee. Takeaway number three, we use computer mice the way we do today because Douglas Engelbart alienated everyone with Chairman Mao's red book and with a cult leader. Takeaway number four, computer mice led American businessmen to stop seeing computers as feminine. And then so many stats and numbers about mouse production, the use of mice in pro gaming, the development of a telephone mouse, the Star Trek jokes about mice, and more.

Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the optical computer mouse and why it is a parable about Silicon Valley. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 19

dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include an amazing computer science journal article by computer scientist Paul Atkinson of the University of Sheffield. Also the book, 1968, Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change. That's a set of essays edited by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and by Mark Aaronson. Tons of amazing journalism from Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and more.

And I also want to highlight resources from a Douglas Engelbart fan site and also from CyberCultural.com. They both show a lot of pictures of forerunners of mice and that knee operation thing. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinjur people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Katie taped this on the traditional land of the Kumye people.

And I want to acknowledge that in our locations, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running

all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 132 that's about the topic of yeast. Fun fact there, someone made a loaf of bread rise with scrapings from ancient Egyptian bakeware from 4,500 years ago. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Un-Shavin' by the BUDDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to

Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.