Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 10/83 - checked

October 1983

Wonderful what technology can do, isn't it? Let me, here and now, expound on why I feel the urge to make such a contentious statement.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was a small person who shared life, bedrooms, Dinky toys and bowls of gruel with some parents, some brothers and an averagely indolent tabby cat. The last of these, as is the way of things in most well-organised households, got at least as good a deal as any of the rest of us - indeed it was often better, as the cat had perfected the trick of demand feeding.

It also was given a present at such times as Christmas and its birthday. Sometimes this would just be a piece of amazingly pungent fish, while on other occasions, it would be a trinket or toy.

One year, I remember, said moggy had a particularly successful season in the fields, and often brought us free samples of what it had captured. As a result of this it was decided to purchase, for the cat's birthday, a replica of its captives that it could practice on at home. We felt that if the cat knew there was one there already, it wouldn't bother bringing home any more.

And so it was, on an arbitrarily selected day in September (we never actually knew the cat's real date of birth), the animal was presented with a small brown paper parcel, which it neatly unwrapped. Inside was a grey, be-wheeled, clockwork mouse.

At first, the tabby was particularly taken with this new toy, and many happy minutes were spent with it chasing the mouse hither and yon. In my desire to please, however, I overwound the motor and with a loud ping, the mouse suffered a terminal coronary. The cat became bored.

In the end, of course, the breakage amounted to no great financial loss, and the investment had served to keep the cat in training at least for a few hours. I wonder if the same can be said of the latest versions of this machine.

I refer to the latest reincarnation of the clockwork cat-teaser, appearing on customers' desks about now. This is the mouse that comes with Lisa, the all-bells-and whistles computer from Apple. Now this machine has had a great deal written about it, much of which has been complimentary. I do not intend to follow this trend. Instead it is the clockwork cat-teaser that interests me, both for what it can do, and what it represents in user terms.

What the mouse can do, of course, is replace the keyboard of a computer for a wide range of man/machine interactions. It does this in a novel and user friendly way, by relating the top of a desk to the display. Move the mouse around the desk on its little wheels and the cursor of the screen will follow suit, mimicking the track that the mouse has taken. Get the mouse/ cursor to the right location and then work can be done, either by pressing buttons on the mouse itself, or via the keyboard.

This is all pretty terrific stuff, the sort of thing that users' dreams are made of. It can also be the stuff of which users' nightmares are made, especially if the user has come to depend on the cat-teaser as the means of communication with the machine. You see, one of the biggest potential problems about the mouse is that, like so many other bits of the stuff of life before it, it is a nasty little mechanical object. As most people will know, nasty little mechanical objects have a boring tendency to break, usually just when you don't want them to.

There have been rumours (unfounded, unwarranted and totally scurrilous, I am sure) that some mice have already been known to . . . well . . . not actually work, shall we say. Either someone has wound the clockwork too hard, or the cat has jumped on it from a great height, causing some form of haemorrhage deep inside its works. Whatever the reason, mice are mechanical, and mechanical very often spells vulnerable to malfunction unless the design is like a tank.

If this starts to happen any more than occasionally, it could become something of an embarrassment to the mouse makers. They will be honour-bound to find some very heavy-handed cats to road test the devices to make sure they operate reliably under a wide range of conditions, and under a wide variety of positive and negative dexterity among the users.

Manufacturers will have to watch out for the fact that users will expect their mice to be operable: indeed, users will come to rely on them like they now rely on the keyboard itself. It would be a shame to spoil £N,000s, worth of hardware and software investment for two-pennyworth of naff mechanical engineering (which is normally the way I view such wonders as my car).

But why are people going to want to use their mice so? The short answer to that is operating systems, things like SmallTalk, the Lisa system, VisiCorp's VisiOn and Digital Research's Concurrent CP/M with the User Interface. With these, at last, the user is starting to get the sort of software service needed to match the potential of the hardware, especially the 16-bit GT computers that are now readily available.

The mice are just another example of the facet of the personal computer that marks the breed out from other types of computer system. They are all remarkably interactive. The human user can sit at the keyboard, watch the display, and get a level of interaction with the machine that in practice is many times faster than that available from most mini or mainframe machines. The mouse just adds to that interactive capability and removes one more layer of the mystique of computing.

That is all wonderful, isn't it? To which the answer is yes . . . but. The 'but' in question is a fast-disappearing one fortunately, for it is the problem of operating systems. Now, I suspect you may be thinking that there are no problems with operating systems. After all, CP/M has been around for years and has a wealth of applications software around to fit it. In the 16-bit market there is Microsoft's MSDOS which, because of the IBM PC connection, seems set to become the dominant force in bigger machine operating systems. Everything is neat and tidy, so what can be wrong with the world?

But up until now, the personal computer has been predominantly a single-tasking machine, which has meant that it has had a remarkable tendency to become input/output bound. This is a neat form of constipation whereby every and all I/O-oriented tasks effectively plug up the works until completed. Perhaps the best example of this is the PRINT run from a word processing file. While the printer sits and chunters away as best it can on your 'N' page report, you might as well make a cup of tea, launch a takeover bid for GEC or go on holiday to the Bahamas. You won't get any sense or response from your computer.

It was precisely this particular problem which prompted Digital Research founder, Gary Kildall, to consider the subject of concurrency. Having to sit and wait for his machine to finish print runs made him aware that he could still be doing other things with it - if it had the right operating system.

His solution to this problem is Concurrent CP/M-86, an operating system that allows a 16-bit computer to run several different programs at the same time. This means that a spreadsheet can be producing figures that can be going into a word processing file that is currently being created, while at the same time the machine is printing out previous efforts.

Couple this capability with the abilities of systems like Lisa or VisiOn, where screen windows can be created and manipulated as desired, and all these new GT computers actually start to live up to their promises on performance. Digital Research is hoping to have a window manager and mouse system available for Concurrent CP/M by the early part of next year - to be called the User Interface - so it will be in there fighting for a major slice of this important market. Single tasking could become an anachronism.

And if such systems can provide your computer with the right laxative to ease its I/O constipation, you are going to need equipment that allows you to keep up with the new, youthful, dynamic, healthy . performance, which is where we came in. The mice, good idea that they are in theory, have got to prove that they are good in practice. They are going to have to work, well and reliably, despite coffee spills, being dropped, sat on or otherwise defiled.

Our cat soon got bored with its mouse and it didn't live long enough to go for its first grease-up.

end