Dedicated to Mice (The Computer Type)

Computer mice are great.  They allow us to interact with computers.  Duh!!  You are probably using one right now to navigate away from this page.  Bear with me for a moment.  Right now I am using a Mac computer with a Microsoft mouse.  I have no clue what model the mouse or computer is.  The Mac is one of those that has the computer and screen in one unit and is big enough to be a small TV.  It's in a 24 hour computer lab at MU.  The library closed a couple hours ago and I had to find a new place to finish my polymer lab reports.

The computer mouse I am using has two buttons and a scroll wheel that can function as a third button.  I just pressed it and nothing happened.  Presumably the button function of the scroll wheel is good for something.  I'm not exactly sure what.

Mac mice used to have only one button which was annoying for those of us who are used to Windows or Linux.  The new ones now have two buttons plus a ball used to scroll.  They don't look like they have two buttons, but if you press the right side it acts like a normal right mouse button and if you press the left side it acts like a normal left mouse button.  The little trackball in the middle can move in any direction.  A disproportionate number of the trackballs on the Mac mice at my school no longer work.  This is annoying when I am trying to scroll through web pages or pdf files of class notes.

The first computer our family had was a Tandy 1000 that my aunt and uncle gave to us.  It came with a mouse, but since it ran Dos 3.3 the mouse was pretty much useless except for a few programs.  It also came with a joystick which didn't work for any of my games.

The next computer I had had a mouse which was more useful.  That computer had Windows 3.1.  The mouse had a ball at the bottom which rolled along the mousepad.  Sensors inside the mouse measured the movement of the ball and translated that into movement of the cursor on the screen.  The cursor tended to jump across the screen.

Eventually I bought an optical mouse.  Actually my parents paid for it.  It was a Logitech.  I had begun to despise Microsoft by then and refused to buy a Microsoft mouse.  Microsoft and Logitech were the two main competitors in the field at that point.  That mouse has worked perfectly ever since and our family still has it.