The joy of mice

Next time you execute a deadly Counterstrike airstrafe attack using a deft combination of finely honed finger movements, spare a thought for the plastic gadget grasped in the palm of your hand. Yes, the input device now taken for granted in today’s world of rapid-reflex gaming has an interesting history of its own. And it wasn’t always about entertainment.

Take the humble mouse, the modern mainstay of any self-respecting PC gamer. Its first incarnation appeared in 1964, a year of unprecedented innovation for Dr Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. During the gestation of their revolutionary hypertextual On-Line System, Engelbart and his team believed that the state of computer technology was restricting their ability to develop new and improved technologies, and a fresh way to manipulate information was surely needed. Favouring an acid-induced philosophy of co-evolution, Engelbart redressed the balance with the ‘X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System’. With the connecting cable originally running tail-like from the rear, the device was nicknamed ‘the mouse’, but in using two separate wheels for vertical and horizontal movement, the bulky contraption proved as cumbersome as its former name suggested, and it was later superseded by Xerox PARC’s aptly titled ‘ball mouse’. Replacing the wheels with rollers that contacted against the sides of a single ball proved a masterstroke, and the device swept into the consumer market as a must-have add-on for the Xerox Alto home computer.

Eight dead-skin sullied years later, the mouse went ‘optical’ and ditched the ball, instead adopting state-of-the-art motion-detection thanks to Steve Kirsch of Mouse Systems Corporation. Early optical models employed an x-y coordinate system embedded in the mouse pad, but as computing power grew cheaper soon image-processing chips were embedded into the mouse itself, to eventually herald the modern-day spate of so-called ‘laser mice’. And so the digital rodent was liberated.

Suffering an ungainly protrusion into the real world, the joystick’s future, by comparison, appeared gloomy. The first electrical joystick was invented around 1945 in Germany and was developed for targeting airborne glide bombs against Allied ships, and by a series of, frankly, paradoxical events, eventually fought itself into the home with the release of the Atari 2600 entertainment system. But if the phallic totem thought it had won the peace and comfort of domesticity it was sorely wrong. While the less-than-joy-stick proved its mettle within the scorching life-or-death intensity of a World War II cockpit, it failed to hold its own against the rigours of Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Summer Games (joystick killers of the world unite!) leaving many a gamer cursing their own masturbatory prowess.

Unexpectedly amidst a mountain of peripheral corpses, the holy grail of callous-inducing frenetics emerged – Nintendo’s comparatively asexual D-pad.

Lapped up by millions of NES gamers, the D-pad ruled the console roost for years to come and inspired a wealth of imitators. But like a phoenix risen from the flames, the fabled joystick enjoyed the last laugh with the dawn of the Nintendo 64 controller and the reintroduction of the additional rotary analogue stick. Gamepads followed suit ever since.

Now, in the face of such a winning combination, who could imagine that a device resembling a 70s TV handset dubiously pronounced ‘weemote’ would become the latest console craze?

Nerve paste

The funny thing was that I had picked the time and place for her death. Not that I’d foreseen her demise. It was a complete shock to me – but then why wouldn’t it have been? Everything was perfect. And I mean love-story perfect. It was eight months into our relationship and she was yet to expose any vice that I could forgive her - and she was only human. That now was all too apparent. Before she succumbed to the constriction, the agonising, retching suffocation I witnessed, she was simply angelic. I don’t apologise for any dewy-eyed nostalgia. It’s true. I won’t skimp on the bare facts as I see them. She was the one you see on the cusp of a heavenly dream, that girl you can’t look at directly, to do so would extinguish her in a wink. She was a total abstraction, too designed for life. She was flawless.


I looked on her ending with a complete sense of confusion. There is a God. And yet, there is no such thing! For how could He ever allow it? For Julia to be taken in such a way was an affront to humanity, even existence itself. To think that a whim could have killed her, a gesture of playfulness, a night-time effervescence on my part, was a constant stabbing pain at my heart. But I was not the sole culprit. I was a mere accessory, and the 'personage' of prime suspicion could not even draw breath – yet it could take it. Oh, it could so easily take it. Do I dare divulge? Can I repeat the monosyllabic slayer of sublime love, dancing heavenly adoration? A pea. It was a pea. A pea killed Julia. And a pea killed me.

She collapsed in her chair, drooping like a flower in intense heat. Her head lolled back, her neck no longer able to withstand the dead weight. The quartet stopped playing almost instantly as a woman shrieked at the table next to us. The saxophonist, he must have been a doctor, rushed from the stage like an animal toward her. Or at least he had first aid training. Where was the doctor?! My eyes darted round the restaurant, frantic for some essential solution to the horror of it all. I was motionless, half-expecting to be swept aside by some nameless authority figure, mouthing those initiatory words in the grip of a tense ritual: ‘Give me some space!’ Or some such saving phrase. Nobody moved. And I watched helpless as her skin turned a sickening colour of green. No-one would ever have thought possible that the spectrum of human complexion spanned to this extreme, yet nobody spoke in a coherence implying what we all knew unequivocally: this woman is dead. Someone help.