Tele-Mouse: The Hybrid Mouse and Phone That Took the '90s by Storm

The world of computing has never hesitated to combine multiple devices and unify functions over the years. Sometimes the experiment turned out well and became a product with the potential to revolutionize the market, but in most cases, the result was a flood of strange accessories that promised the world in their boxes, only to prove of limited utility in practice. One such accessory was the Tele-Mouse, a hybrid between a conventional telephone and a mouse…

In the latter half of the 1990s, Windows 98 dominated the world. The concept of residential broadband was still in its infancy, and our main connectivity resource was the traditional modem, with its anemic 3–4 kilobytes per second (at best). The fights over control of the phone line became endless, and when the bill arrived at the end of the month, even the toughest fell to their knees.

Moreover, a full computer could take up a lot of space in those years. Printer, scanner, external modem, phone, fax machine... let's say there were plenty of reasons to unite and combine different functions into a reduced number of devices. That gave rise to developments like the softmodem (also called winmodem), the advance of multifunction printers, and a small accessory that overnight appeared in almost all stores: the Tele-Mouse.

That's right: a mouse and a phone sharing the same case. At first glance it looks like an Atari Jaguar controller, but there's nothing extraordinary about its operation: the 'mouse part' connected to a PS/2 or serial port, and the user got a dial tone with a second cable that went from the Tele-Mouse to the 'Phone' port of the modem, or directly to the phone box. Some variants of this accessory included microphone and speaker; others, however, followed the 'hands-free' route with a separate connector for headphones and microphone.

The market was quickly invaded by clones from China, but a quick search among patents confirms that several high-profile companies explored and launched similar devices. For example, the folks at Micron (yes, the same Micron of memory) published its patent US6285354B1 in November 1998. Samsung did the same in Taiwan a year later, and Dell registered its version in January 2001. Now, if we talk about recent models, some arrows point to the Sony Vaio Mouse Talk, with the difference that it is a VoIP phone, designed for services like Skype.

Have you ever used one of these Tele-Mouse devices? Personally, I remember it didn't sound bad, but having three cables coming out of the mouse instead of one was anything but comfortable, and there was always the accidental press of a key on the models without a cover. Leave a comment!

Source: Tedium