Many mice that use a USB receiver have a storage compartment for it inside the mouse. Some “nano receivers” are designed to be small enough to remain plugged into a laptop during transport, while still being large enough to easily remove. The earliest mass-market mice, such as on the original Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari ST mice used a D-subminiature 9-pin connector to send the quadrature-encoded X and Y axis signals directly, plus one pin per mouse button. The mouse was a simple optomechanical device, and the decoding circuitry was all in the main computer.
It requires the user to be able to feel depth or hardness; this ability was realized with the first electrorheological tactile mice but never marketed. When mice have more than one button, the software may assign different functions to each button. Often, the primary (leftmost in a right-handed configuration) button on the mouse will select items, … Read More