A bus mouse is a variety of PC mouse which is attached to the computer using a specialized interface (originally, the Microsoft InPort interface developed for Microsoft's original mouse product). In the late 1980s, mice were not integrated with IBM-compatible personal computers, and the specialized bus interface (implemented via an ISA add-in card) was one of two popular ways to connect a mouse. (Serial interfaces, common on engineering workstations, were the other method.) When the IBM PS/2 was introduced, it included a motherboard mouse interface which was integrated with the keyboard controller (still called the PS/2 mouse interface long after the PS/2 brand was withdrawn); this fairly quickly drove the bus mouse design out of the marketplace.
The bus mouse lived on in the NEC PC-98 family of personal computers in Japan.
Famous quotes containing the words bus and/or mouse:
“There was an old man from Darjeeling
Who got on a bus bound for Ealing.
It said at the door,
“Please don’t spit on the floor,”
So he carefully spat on the ceiling.”
—Anonymous.
“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)