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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

Great comment about the mouse at the end.

    John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen 
    if you put more than one key on a keyboard. 
    But I didn’t.”

The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is throw away their crappy mouse, and replace it with a decent three button mouse.

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Carmack comedic skills seem as high as his engineering skills.

I would pay to see his happy deadpan delivery of that question to Steve Jobs and enjoy the pause after that.

Kind of an apples to oranges comparison on Carmack's point though (no pun intended). Keyboards were invented 100 years earlier than the mouse. People, especially older adults, instinctively knew how to use them.

I don’t think it was remotely serious, he probably just wanted to say it to tease him a bit

When the first keyboard type interface was invented for typewriters and such, did people instinctively know how to use them immediately? Besides, at that time the concept of a two button mouse was not new and had been in use with computers for years.

I don't know about when typewriters were new, but up until recently, many people were actively scared to use a computer. I worked with people who would physically shake when they would use a computer because they terrified of breaking something.

The mouse, while designed to help quell those fears, was still a part of the computer and still scary to those people.

The number of buttons probably didn't matter in the whole scheme of things. They would've been afraid of it regardless. But his instinct was already to remove anything from a design that wasn't absolutely necessary. So it fit with his way of thinking to suggest that people wouldn't use a mouse with two buttons. If eliminating one button could make those people less afraid of the computer, then that was the way to go.

All that said; I too thought that mouse sucked. But I was a power user by then and it wasn't designed for me.

> because they terrified of breaking something

Not really. More like they were terrified that the keyboard would shoot out sparks and fire, and throw them across the bridge of the Enterprise.

Also, keyboards have letters

Funny how people can such a different taste for these things. I've switched back from Mac to Windows some time ago, and the thing I miss the most is the touchbar.

You can't possibly mean the touchbar. Are you talking about the touchpad?

Yes. Thanks for the correction; I can't imagine anyone who enjoys this abomination.

Ha, even as a 10 year old kid in '96 I found the Mac's decision to have a 1 button mouse to be painful (coming from windows). I remember not having much of a concept of how companies were ran but instinctively felt there had to be someone stubborn somewhere.

But new Mac mice have two buttons and a scroll wheel. Then have for at least a decade.

No friggin' middle mouse button though. You can't even configure their mice? to behave as if it had a middle button. Go ahead. Try.

Maybe get the touchpad instead then.

You throw away an $80 mouse?

No different than throwing away a $100 OS when you buy a computer. Sometimes there simply isn't a way to purchase it without the undesired item included.

> You throw away an $80 mouse?

If it doesn't do what one wants it to do, it's worth $0 to them.

But potentially worth something to someone else, which is an argument for selling it or even donating it. Throwing it away seems downright silly.

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