Y pen to mouse?
Convective thought. I've probably asked this before, but for some reason it struck me as a damn good question today.

Why did the mouse take over from the pen?

Electronic writing with pens started in 1890 with the Gray Telautograph, which was commercially popular until 1930 or so.

Light pens were common on analog and digital computers from 1940 to 1980. They were still around in the '90s. I owned a light-pen tracer gadget for a while, but it wasn't adapted to most programs, so I stopped using it and eventually discarded it.

The mouse is less convenient than the pen in EVERY SINGLE WAY.

Humans have been drawing and writing with sticks and brushes and pens ever since we've been human. It's probably an innate talent. We began with pictures, then iconized the pictures to make tallies and ledgers for inventory and transactions, then spread the symbols in two directions toward numbers and alphabets.

We've never drawn or written with big round rocks. We've always used sticks. The rock-like mouse doesn't fit between fingers, requires an unnatural wrist posture, and can't be moved with the same fine precision as a stick.

When writing with a stick or pen, you can SEE what you're writing. Even with a light pen that doesn't leave a trace, your eyes can form an afterimage of the point. You can't see where the center of the mouse is. In the earliest development of typewriters the writing was on the bottom of the platen where you couldn't see it. This was instantly understood as a problem, and it was soon solved by Hammond and others. The same problem has never been seen or solved with the mouse.

The stylus has returned to the computer world in specialized commercial signature devices, where it serves the same purpose as the Telautograph; but it hasn't returned to general usage for drawing.

Was the mouse an intentional dumbing down, a competitive tactic by Xerox to get Apple to steal a poor substitute for pens?

Labels: Alternate universe, Asked and unanswered

  ¶ 1:18 PM