Figure 1. An actual Felix mouse.

Reader Sean, or “Commander Hurricane,” recently emailed me a photo that brought back some memories.

It’s Felix the mouse, the wonderful, wonderful mouse.

I first met Felix back in 1992. Back then, the editorial staff of PC Computing magazine was trying to woo me. They wanted me to come on board as a writer. I was thrilled.

Back in the early 1990s, I was writing more magazine articles than books. I probably wrote two or three articles a month for various computer magazines. I also had a month computer humor column in Compute! magazine.

PC Computing magazine was one of the major computer magazines back in the early 1990s. Yes, people actually read magazines back then. I subscribed to 5 or 6 of them: PC Computing, PC Magazine (which was the Big Dog), Compute!, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, BYTE, INFOWorld, MacWorld, and so on. Those were the days.

Of course, these days they give away all that stuff people once paid for. Stupid writers giving away their stuff free on the Internet . . .

Landing a regular gig at a magazine was something I strived for. Having such a gig at PC Computing would have been a dream. So when the PC Computing Editor-in-Chief flew up to Seattle to meet me, I was floored.

Then they flew me down to the San Francisco bay area to have meetings with staff and such. But by then I wasn’t as thrilled. That’s because they kept asking me what I’d want to do for them. I’d say, “Have a monthly column.” Then they’d come back and say, “Yeah, but what would you like to do for us?”

It was confusing. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but that’s the way I remember it: They wanted me to come onboard, but they never revealed what it was they really wanted. It was like they wanted me to say something, some magic word that I was supposed to know, but I never came up with the right word. So the whole thing just kind of fizzled.

I do remember writing articles for them, one article in particular was a survey of all the strange and wonderful types of computer mice available in 1992. The magazine had manufactures send me about a dozen mice. I wrote an article, which you can read here, though PC Computing never published it.

It was common for me to receive PC hardware in the mail for review back then. I was sent dozens of keyboards, various software packages, and so on. I had to examine, write, and submit articles all the time. It was fun — most of the time: I did the math on how much time it would take to install and evaluate 10 different graphics cards. Even at $1000 the time I put in wouldn’t be worth it.

In the end, I never did end up working as a writer for PC Computing. My name did appear in the masthead one issue. That was cool. And the picture of Felix the Mouse brought all that back. Good times. Fun memories.