Today in Tedium: Is there a product that has meshed as well with the modern office as the mouse pad? The squishy, rubbery rectangle, home to a million snazzy designs and a defining piece of cubicle furniture, was (and still kinda is) like a Trapper Keeper for adults , a commodity product that was an essential accessory for computer users for decades. Even in an age where optical mice rule the roost, mouse pads are still common. So, where the heck did they come from, and where did they go? A reader, Martin Jost, posed that question to me recently . As far as where they came from, I went straight to the source. — Ernie @ Tedium

The year the mouse was invented, one of many impressive things that researcher Douglas Engelbart—he of “ The Mother of All Demos “—can be credited for. In a Wired article , the late inventor noted that in experiments with other types of pointing devices, the mouse was a clear winner. “It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes,” he explained. Among the other things his team tried included joysticks, a knee-based mechanical pointing device, and a stylus-like device. The mouse won, but it needed a surface.

(via an eBay listing)

How the mouse pad came to life at the height of Mac-mania

Not to rehash history too much, but it’s worth emphasizing that the Apple Macintosh did a lot to bring computers to life, particularly the mouse. It wasn’t the first computing device to have a mouse, but it did a lot to streamline where and how it was used.

(One major difference: Unlike Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs made his mice with one button, rather than three.)

One thing that’s lost in all the stories about the Mac is the early ecosystem built around it. There were all sorts of accessories being made for the earliest editions of the Mac, many of dubious value, many hiding in the back pages of the earliest issues of MacWorld.

Also hiding there were some of the earliest efforts to sell mouse pads to the world—something we can thank Bob McDermand for.

McDermand doesn’t claim to be the straight-up inventor of the mouse pad—he says it’s too strong a term for what he did, and he’s heard rumors that others had the same idea slightly before he did. (The New York Times, in a 1987 roundup of computer accessories, did call him the inventor, however, so let’s give him some of that credit.)

Nonetheless McDermand, through his company Moustrak, most certainly made the mouse pad famous. He also helped to define its most famous form: The rounded rectangle of polyester on rubber that turned any surface into one perfect for a tracking device. (His company’s specific nomenclature for the objects, “Mouspad,” didn’t stick nearly as well.)

It helped that McDermand, a onetime aviation instructor who was working with the San Francisco investment banker Van Kasper & Company in the early 1980s, was in the right place at the right time.

His heart-of-Silicon-Valley job and aviation experience helped him forge friendships with Steve Wozniak (who was a fellow pilot) and Steve Jobs (who wasn’t), and through his relationship with Jobs, he got his hands on an early Mac prototype.

When he had a chance to try it out, he noticed something kind of interesting: The mousing experience varied wildly, depending on the surface.

“I took it to the office and had an oak desk there, and the mouse didn’t work very well with an oak desk,” he noted. “And I took it home, and it worked very beautifully on my glass table—I had a coffee table that was made of heavy, thick glass.”

After trying out books, sheets of paper, and other alternative surfaces, he made a realization: “I needed some type of surface that I could carry with me so it would be consistent.”

McDermand’s first efforts at building a mouse pad used formica, a hard, laminate surface that did the job, but eventually he and his collaborators stumbled on polyester—a surface that made the mouse pad flexible and, crucial to its future success, made it possible to transfer designs onto the surface. Soon enough, he was working with a rubber manufacturer and he had a side project on his hands—one that quickly required him to quit his job to focus on making mouse pads full time.

McDermand and his company Moustrak got off to a low-key start, but two things happened that quickly turned his company into a winner: First, his early ads in magazines like MacWorld (one of which is shown above), and two, a decision by Apple to distribute some of Moustrak’s early mouse pads, emblazoned with the Apple logo, to computer sellers around the country.

It wasn’t long before McDermand and his company were producing millions of mouse pads as marketing swag for companies and as branded material for companies like Disney, Paramount, and LucasFilm.

But there were some bumps along the way, particularly when the company started testing mouse pads using synthetic materials. The pads, which had ethylene in them, caused a chemical reaction in rare cases.

“They would destroy one type of furniture—lacquered desks,” he said.

(Yes, they paid thousands of dollars to fix a desk in at least one case prior to changing the formula.)