“If you’re a trained, high-volume production typist,” asked Seymour Rubinstein, the WordStar developer, “what are you going to do with a mouse except feed it cheese?”^[107]

Score one for Rubinstein. He says mice are great—if you have three hands.

Doing graphics? A mouse, maybe. But damned if I’m going to take my hands off the keyboard to push the cursor from one spot on the screen to the next.

It’s simply too much wasted motion. I instead just press the cursor keys right above the main keyboard. Or I use WordStar’s cursor-moving commands. And even if I hadn’t learned touch typing a quarter century ago, I’d still wonder if a mouse for word processing wasn’t the Silicon Valley version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Next time you’re in California, maybe you’ll see Apple execs naked in the streets as well as their hot tubs. Well, maybe not. The mouse could be a great marketing tool for sales reps peddling Macs or Apple IIc’s to people hoping to do word processing. But experienced typists? Many would probably groan over all the excursions that the mouse forced them to take from the main keyboard.

Some enemies of mice—cats?—also wonder if jockeying the cursor this way couldn’t be a little tiring for people writing or typing. Think of the hand-eye coordination required. You’re rolling a palm-sized gizmo on your desk to position the cursor on a single letter at times, and that might not wear too well if you‘re working for hours on end.

Mind you, the rodents have their friends, especially at Apple, where, inconsiderately, the hardware wizards didn’t even favor the Macintosh with cursor keys.

Joe Shelton, the Apple products manager mentioned in Chapter 7, says he does most of his writing with a mouse. He suggests the mouse-equipped Macintosh for “naïvenaïve users.” Your term, Joe. Now I’ll slightly water down my jeremiads. Macintosh-style computers offer nifty graphics and nice offbeat typefaces. So some trendy writers may want one—rodent or not.

And if you’re an executive or someone else not doing heavy word processing? Then maybe, just maybe, a mouse is for you. Perhaps you’re working with spreadsheets, a number of programs in fact, and you write only a small fraction of the time.

Richard Webb—a partner at Peat, Marwick and Mitchell, the big accounting firm that advised Apple during development of the Macintosh and ordered thousands of them—swears by the mouse for spreadsheets. He says that alone would justify the mouse.

I’m not a spreadsheet artist and will take a pro’s word. But at least for heavy-duty writing and typing, the old cursor keys are my best bet.

Graphics is different. There, the cursor keys are more cumbersome.

One artist, however, wanted not a mouse but an electronic “pad and a stylus”; he might be happy with a digitizing tablet—also known as a graphics tablet—like the well-known KoalaPad. You can write on this surface with a stylus or your finger and the computer will display the lines on its screen.

A touch-sensitive screen is still another possibility—for some people—both in word processing and graphics. You point your finger at a spot on the screen. Bingo! You can start moving a paragraph or perform graphics magic. But touch typists may face the same problem as with the mouse—wasted motion—and some people may tire of reaching up to the screen again and again. Also, touch-sensitive screens may not be precise enough for you to pick out just one number or letter.

Hugh Hunt raised an interesting issue.

“What happens if a fly lands on the Hewlett-Packard screen?” he asked someone about a computer with a touch screen.

Well, I hear, the HP 150’s screen uses infrared touch sensors that are more than fly length from the glass. “Debugging” the 150, Hewlett-Packard must have thought of everything.

Yet other pointing devices are:

● The joystick. Moving the stick around, you move the cursor. A neat idea. But it’s more fit for video games than word processing and many other business programs—you just can’t point exactly.

● The trackball. You move the cursor by rotating a ball inside an enclosure. Want the cursor to go faster? Then rotate the ball more energetically. The trackball is found most often in arcade-style systemssystems. It’s great for chasing aliens and may have uses in spreadsheets and data-base management, but some people say it’s an abomination for word processing.

● The light pen, with which you could electronically “draw” on the screen. Draw? Okay. Write? Well, it’s “wasted motion” time again here, as with the other items on this list.

As computers climb the executive ladders—as more nontypists use them—these alternatives may grow in importance. And what about people on the factory floor? They may use such gizmos to make new inventory entries or machine adjustments. Partly the world is learning to type, and partly the computer is learning to understand devices other than the keyboard.

What cursor-control gizmos are ahead? I’ll keep reading the National Enquirer articles about people moving objects with their minds. Maybe, the hard-core hackers are thinking, the next gimmick will feature some user-friendly ESP.