“It runs only in circle within the wheel!
Thank heavens that it does not squeal!
Never had a creature like this in this house!
It is round and small and tis called a computer mouse!!”
There was a time when we all had that irritating mouse! The one with the ball! Some early geeks would have had the ball on top which was the trackball but the ones which most had were the ones with the ball on the bottom!
Somehow though I used to like it! It was a marvel how the ball inside would move and and the arrow would move along with it!
Then later came the wheel! Not the chariot kind but the mouse one!
The wheel is still an integral part of the mouse unlike the ball!
Did you know that the original function of the Wheel which turned out to be scroll was actually made to zoom!?
read on!
So this mouse had some smooth function when it started! You could always tell a new mouse from the old by the scroll!
The ball would have becomes dirty and it acted almost like a mini vacuum cleaner! The thrill of discovering an old mouse with a computer arrow going slow was so cool!
Then all we had to do was remove the ball and you would be surprised at the dirt collected! Slowly but surely all the dirt was cleaned and a gentle blow here and a firm wipe there and the ball would be shining! We would remove it and play around with it just for fun!
Finally the joy of seeing the arrow move so prompt along with the mouse was unparalleled! Many times I would invert the mouse and the ball would disappear! Then we would manually move the mouse and see the arrow move! That was thrilling! My kids would laugh if they read this now!
The horror is when the mouse moved but the arrow remained in the screen in spite of cleaning and clearing all the dust! Then you know the dreaded windows frozen screen! Only the three magical buttons may work or you would have to go for a hard restart fervently praying that the work may have been stored! Which is why even now as a habit I keep on pressing Ctrl + S every instant when I type something!
Now in spite of the terrible mechanical look in an otherwise smooth non moving parts device, the mouse had its own appeal!
The only two main moving part at the time were the mouse and the CD/DVD tray which always had issues! No wonder both have been efficiently removed by versions which do not have moving parts in them! Still I miss the mouse!
With the wheel now remaining the only moving part of the mouse, the thing to go was the ball which has been now been replaced by the optical scrolling!
The original inventor of the mouse wheel has been credited to be Eric and his team from Microsoft. In his own article titled The History of the Scroll Wheel; he explains how it was first thought for the zoom function!
Back in 1993, as he was watching many Excel users do their work, he noticed the difficulty they had moving around large spreadsheets!
Finding and jumping to different sections was often difficult.
Eric then had the idea that perhaps a richer input device would help.
His original idea was the zoom lever.
This was simply a lever, presumably for your non-mouse hand (i.e. on the left side of your keyboard if you’re right-handed). When you push it away from you the spreadsheet zooms out. When you pull it towards you, it zooms back in!
He prototyped this by hooking a joystick up to his computer and using DDE to connect it to Excel for zooming. Using a joystick button along with the stick, he also had it do “data zooming”, which was drilling in and out through Excel outlines!
But focusing on zooming was a very Excel-centric approach. More specifically, it was a very 2-D centric approach!
That is, using an application that presents 2-dimensional data, like a spreadsheet or graphics, it’s very useful to zoom in and out. But the other main style of application is a linear flow application like Word, and there it’s not as useful. You could do zooming with Word, where zooming out shows you a multi-page view and then you click on a desired page and zoom into it, but that’s not as natural as with a spreadsheet or graphics and images!
Around this time, the hardware guys came back and said that they had considered adding a wheel to the mouse, but they didn’t know what it would be used for. Document navigation answered that question, so they said that if Eric could get Office to support it, they would build it.
This really meant Excel and Word since they were the “800 lb gorillas” — if Excel and Word supported something, then the other Office apps would follow, and if Office as a whole supported something, then everyone else would follow too! This is because during that time, computer was mainly for word and excel work which means documentation which it still is today if you take out the games!
Eric was completely fixated on the idea that the wheel should be for zooming by default, but finally relented when he met resistance from legendary technology journalist Walt Mossberg. Before they shipped it, they added a button under the wheel, and made the default wheel action “scroll”!
The rest as they say is how the Wheel was made! My mother used to love the older mouse only since she used to play a cute little game called the Monster Hunter with it! The optical mouse was never that good for her because it needed the mouse pad! Another mom favourite were the cop movies of birthday celebrity Suresh Gopi especially Eklavyan! She would have felt so happy with his recent victory!
Now keep the mouse pad safe and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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