Installing a mouse back in the old days.

The days when the mouse made you cuss and spit.  Those were the good old days and I’m glad they’re gone.  In the late 80’s and early 90’s the mouse that is now so plug in and play friendly, used to be one of the hardest devices to install.  Most people that I talk to have long forgotten how hard it was to just hook up a mouse to a computer.  There were IRQ conflicts, especially if you had a modem.  Most of the mouse devices back in those days wanted to use com port 2 by default.  That’s where most modems were installed too.  As we all know, you can’t have the two devices sharing the same IRQ without having problems.  Some manufactures like Logitech, made their own special mouse cards that you installed in a computer slot on the motherboard.  This solved the IRQ problem.  These cards were called bus mouse cards.  This really helped the mouse problems.  Then the computer industry came up with the idea of a ps2 mouse port on the computer.  Installing a mouse got easier and the IRQ conflicts went away for consumers that had the newer computers.  The only problem was that manufactures of computers forgot to color code the mouse port and the keyboard port.  This became frustrating for a lot of people, because they would plug in the mouse or keyboard into the wrong port.  The ports looked alike and they were both ps2 ports, but your mouse would not work on the ps2 keyboard port and the keyboard would not work on the mouse port.  Finally, and I’m not sure when it happened the USB port was added to the computer.  This is when the real plug and play started to work.  This was great, not just for the mouse and keyboard but for hundreds of devices to follow that could be connected this way.  Today the standard computer comes with about 6 to 8 USB ports.  You can connect any thing from a digital camera to a night light to your computer.  We really have come a long way.  Thank God!

James L. McArdle

Texas PC Clinic   texaspcclinic.com Computer Repair Since 1993