It actually started as a joke during my undergraduate studies. One of my friends told me about it. There is this friend of his who is not that brilliant and once she wanted to copy some files from my friend’s PC to her PC during a computer lab session. She came to his seat, used the mouse to select the file, right clicked the file and selected the option copy. Then she asked him to give his mouse. My friend got surprised and asked why? She said, “Now that I have copied the data to the mouse, I can connect this mouse to my machine and paste it there”. I am not sure whether it’s just a story or whether it actually happened. But since I know her, I consider all the possibility for this situation to happen.
When this ‘urban legend’ was supposedly happened, computers were running Windows 98 on PII/PIII processors, where mice used PS/2 connectors and I wonder whether flash memory and memory sticks were ever heard of the except as a costly gadget of a geek. Now that, around 6-7 years have passed, computers have powerful processors, almost everyone has a USB mouse and it’s difficult to meet a person without some form of storage, whether it’s a flash memory stick, or a portable MP3 player, or IPOD or even a portable HDD.
Now let’s come to the idea. Why can’t we think about what my dear friend had suggested? Attaching a storage device to a small mouse? Many of my friends including me have a laptop and it’ll be with me almost all the time and I keep a mouse also. In my case, I don’t like using the touchpad that extensively. So I take the mouse with me whenever possible. As of now, if I have to copy some data, I have to connect it through the USB device, copy it there. But if I have a storage attached to my mouse, may be I can simply connect my mouse to a USB port, click ‘copy to mouse’ and that’s it. Like my dear lady friend said, I can take the mouse out and connect it to another computer and it has the data.
Since most of the mouse models these days use a USB interface, there may not be much hardware innovation required I think. I am not that expert in the hardware design and all, but I hope this can be done without much trouble. One of my colleagues is carrying a small mouse with winding cable (which will go inside the mouse). In that case it will be very handy also I guess. Since both mouse & memories are relatively cheap these days, cost-wise also this may not be a trouble.
Right after writing till here, I did a Google-ing to find out whether anyone has already did this, and the results amazed me. Lots of them have already been out in the market. Here are some links.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/usb-flash-memory-wireless-mouse-134610.php
http://www.sz-wholesale.com/shenzhen_China_products/Flash-Memory-Mouse_1.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-12mmm8000pr.mspx
I think I am little late with this idea. Anyway I cannot say the idea is really mine. Hats off to my lady friend, who had the foresight to predict such a product, even if it was an ‘accident’. One should not forget that many of the great inventions are the aftermath of ‘miraculous’ accidents.
ps: If this idea had struck me sometime back, I could have patented it (joking).
