“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 “naïve[naïve] 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.