WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE COMPUTERS

WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE COMPUTERS
The mouse is sorely missed.
By Ian Bogosh
JANUARY 24, 2024

Once upon a time, long before smartphones or even laptops were ubiquitous, the computer mouse was new, and it was thrilling. The 1984 Macintosh wasn’t the first machine to come with one, but it was the first to popularize the gizmo for ordinary people. Proper use of the mouse was not intuitive. Many people had a hard time moving and clicking at the same time, and “double-clicking” was a skill one had to learn. Still, anyone could put a hand on the thing, move it around on a table, and see the results on-screen: A little cursor moved along with you. “Pointing is a metaphor we all know,” Steve Jobs told Playboy in 1985. The mouse was central to the computer’s populist future, which wasn’t yet assured at the time.
But the Mousing Age that followed didn’t last for very long. By the 2010s, the device was clearly in a steep decline. It never went away, of course; the computer-peripherals giant Logitech still nets some $750 million in yearly sales of “pointing devices.” But the mouse has receded into the shadows and there adapted to a smaller niche, sprouting strange new features and accoutrements. The simple and iconic mouse morphology of the 1990s—the one you see in mouse emoji (🖱️)—is now a basic throwback. Newer species come with pulsating lights or die-cut air vents or extra wheels and buttons. This is evolution through collapse: The basic functions mousing once performed are themselves headed to extinction. You operate a smartphone with your finger. Your computer is probably a laptop with a trackpad. People still use mice, but not as a matter of course. The mouse persists in contrast to the victories it helped bring about.
Those victories were hard-earned. In the 1980s, Macs were uncommon, and Apple’s more popular computers, the Apple II line, didn’t use one. Microsoft had been selling a mouse of its own since 1983, but it remained an optional accessory even in the age of early Windows. One summer, in the early 1990s, I spent an internship in the financial-services industry operating a graphical user interface entirely with keyboard commands, and it was fine.
Just a few years later, though, enough pieces were in place to make the mouse mainstream. Windows had been widely adopted. The World Wide Web was spreading, and the mouse would be the board for surfing through its clickable links. More people bought and used computers, and they used them for more things—working, gaming, shopping, booking travel, paying bills. The tiny engine of this revolution? It was the mouse.

But mousing always made more sense when you treated your computer’s “desktop” as exactly that: a discrete, rectangular space. The mouse pad was a stand-in for the screen, and shared its borders. You could scroll by clicking on a scroll bar, but these two forms of navigation were in some sense disconnected. The subsequent emergence of the scroll-wheel mouse helped bridge this gap, even as our journeys on the endless ocean of the internet made scrolling more important.
By 2006, laptops sporting trackpads or rubbery controller nubs (properly known as “pointing sticks”) were outselling desktop computers. One year later, the iPhone brought the touch screen and its gasp-inducing finger-scrolling into fashion. A new mode of connected computing had arrived. Desktop computers would persist, as would computer desktops. But now the screen was understood to be a tiny portal to a larger world. A mouse was too delicate to thrive amid such vastness.
Computers themselves spread beyond the boundary of the office too. The café, the train, the bed, the lounge, the Uber: Connectivity was everywhere. Where a mouse had once suggested knowledge work and a need for full engagement with computers, its meaning soon reversed. A desktop with a mouse attached came to signal lower-status jobs that were still tethered to a place. A receptionist might use a mouse; so might a quick-oil-change cashier, or someone working at an airline gate.
In this new computer landscape, mouse life would find a way. The mouse I am mousing at my desk right now, a Logitech MX Master 3S, offers a pair of ridged, metal spindles for scrolling in two directions independently. Its several secondary buttons can be programmed; I have dedicated one to deleting emails. If I were a committed PC gamer, I might go in for a mouse with rubbery grips and precision sensors—a Razer Viper V2 Pro or maybe a DeathAdder. There are also mice that cradle vertically, with the thumb facing up instead of sideways, which can be essential for people with repetitive stress injuries. Fans and critics of these devices speak of them as one might speak of sports cars or fine wines: The clicks are fairly light, or a robust construction that feels comfortable and durable in hand.
Read: Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?
In the meantime, ordinary mice were left behind. (As of 2024, Apple sells just one computer with a mouse included, and the only way to charge that mouse is to flip it over on its back, like an upended cockroach.) The diminishment of the mouse ought to be lamented, as some computing tasks—design work, for example, or database administration—still benefit from its precise control. But I think there is another, deeper reason for nostalgia: The de-mousing of computers has severed users from the action of computing. It has disconnected us from the feeling of control.
Remember (if you can) the classic drag-and-drop: You’d mouse over to a file or a folder, click to slide the icon to the trash, then release to drop it in. In the age of finger-scrolls and trackpads, that computing gesture feels bizarre. The once-routine activity of moving things around the screen—files to or from a disk, pictures into or out of albums, chunks of text in word processors—is simply harder to get done. Think about the UI somersaults you have to turn just to rearrange your phone apps.
Double-clicking too. Once, this was the way you opened up a file or a program. Now it’s workplace jargon: “Let’s double-click on that idea.” Cringey as that sounds, the phrase attests to what a mouse’s actions could embody. Clicking, moving, dragging—these were elemental ways of interacting with machines, and also ways of understanding them. A mouse could burrow into folders and pull out data in its teeth. It could make you feel like you were crawling in there with the circuits. But that way of connecting to computers is defunct. The screen is just a window now, and we’re only tapping on the glass.

Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.