The sun is shining. A new day calls. You have work to do, but you’re playing hooky from the office. Fortunately you have your new Compaq LTE. You can take your work anywhere! And you do! Off to the coffee bistro you roll. In tow is your fully-charged 8086, 250K laptop and your Microsoft Thumb Mouse. The year is 1989.
Yeah, I know: 1989. That’s an interesting year as far as computers were concerned. In politics . . .
What’s a thumb mouse?
Glad you asked.
Thumb mouse wasn’t the official term. Each manufacturer had its own name for the gizmos. For example, in Figure 1 you see a Microsoft Ballpoint Mouse. I purchased it back in the late 1980s and still have it today for some reason.
Figure 1. The Microsoft Ballpoint mouse. That’s a 9-pin serial port connector at the end of the cord.
Gizmos like the Ballpoint mouse were extremely popular back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Macintosh, barely out of diapers, popularized the concept of the computer mouse. PC users obviously wanted a mouse, too! Desktop mice were popular, although hardly necessary for DOS programs. For a laptop, however, the desktop mouse didn’t fit in with the portable nature.
At the time, Laptop manufacturers were more concerned with weight and battery life than with frills like a pointing device. The trackpad wouldn’t arrive for years. In fact, Apple’s first Macintosh laptop, introduced in 1989, had a trackball mouse to the right of the keyboard — just like the thumb mouse!
My first laptop was the bulky Dell 320. (Click here to see an image.) It didn’t have a mouse, so I clamped the Ballpoint mouse to the edge of the keyboard. Yes, those are clamps at the bottom of the Ballpoint mouse. In Figure 2 you see the mouse clamped to the side of the NEC Ultralite, which was my second PC laptop.
Figure 2. The Microsoft Ballpoint mouse clamped to the side of an NEC Ultralite, vintage 1989 laptop.
Now, Figure 2 is a myth. First, that isn’t my original Ultralite. Second, the Ultralite lacked a 9-pin serial port. I couldn’t (and didn’t) use the Ballpoint mouse with it. In fact, the Ultalight, with it’s limited 2MB of storage, didn’t have room for any software that required a mouse.
In fact, now that I think of it, very little PC software demanded that you use a mouse for input. Paint programs existed, and you could modify WordPerfect to use a mouse, although it was clumsy. Microsoft had a few DOS mouse programs, but nothing that really warranted getting the Ballpoint.
No, I confess that it was just a cool gizmo to have, another toy. That’s probably why I’ve kept it all these years.
