I. Morphology

Disculus confusus presents as a disc: 78 millimetres across, 37 tall, a flattened lozenge of translucent polycarbonate laid over one mechanical button of unusual generosity. The naturalist has rotated the specimen in his hand many times, in good light, and can report with confidence that there is no front. Nor a rear for that matter. For a device designed to be used without ocular attention, ocular attention is demanded.

He is prepared to call this democratic, in the sense that a device with no obvious orientation cannot discriminate against the wrong hand. He is also prepared to call it what it is: a peripheral that has abolished the very quality peripherals exist to provide, which is the ability to be picked up and used without first being interrogated.

A small protrusion marks the underside near the cable, intended to be found by touch and to whisper “forward” to the fingertips before the eyes get involved. It is not large enough to be felt at any speed above a crawl: it performs its function only for users already moving too slowly to need it.

II. Behavior

The specimen tracks motion by a single ball rolling against the desk, in the manner of every rodent of its era, and asks in return only a flat surface and the occasional excavation of dust from its receptor rollers. This much is unremarkable. Every mouse of 1998 made the same demand.

What is remembered, and what the naturalist must now catalogue at length because the specimen leaves him no shorter way to do it, is the disorientation reflex: the tendency, upon being lifted and set back down by any hand, to land facing a direction indistinguishable from correct until the cursor is moved and travels somewhere it was not asked to go. The user’s response is always the same three-part ritual: confusion, rotation, relief.^{1J. Siracusa has referred to interactions such as this as a "micro aggression from an inanimate object," and the naturalist must agree.} The specimen offers this ritual to every user, every time, without favour. In this respect alone it is scrupulously democratic.

This specimen was once described in print by Dr. Erasmus Gull, F.Z.S.^{2Mussy once attempted to return a specimen of this kind by post using only the customs declaration, in the belief that an object with no front could not, strictly, be addressed to anyone. It came back to him twice, forwarding fees unpaid both times.}, as “the most honest device Apple ever built, having no front to hide.” The naturalist has read the sentence several times in the hope that it improves. It does not. A device that requires its user to guess, four times a day, which way is forward is not honest. It is merely unwilling to lie about having deceived you.

III. Vestigial & Absent Structures

A word must be entered, reluctantly, in the specimen’s defence, and entered only after confirming that no one is watching: it introduced USB to the consumer Mac. Every peripheral that came before it was rendered obsolete in an afternoon, and the specimen did this quietly, from the underside of a computer that was busy being looked at for other reasons. Credit is owed. It is entered here, briefly, and the account is now closed.

IV. Convergent Evolution

The circular mouse is not a form nature repeats. It appears once in most specimen records, is found wanting, and is not attempted again by the same hand. D. confusus is not unique in its ambition toward rotational symmetry, only unusually committed to it: other designers have flirted with the circle and each has been recalled to the same lesson, that the human hand asks for a front the way a compass asks for a north.

The iMac G3 itself, Computator pellucidus of order Desktopia, is the host organism from which this specimen cannot be separated even in memory. Translucent, colour-matched, briefly ubiquitous, it produced Disculus confusus as its most extreme peripheral expression: a shape so committed to matching its host that it forgot to also be a mouse.

V. Issued With

Disculus confusus was never sold apart from its host, never adopted by another Mac, and never given a chance to be anything other than what the iMac G3 required of it.

It was discontinued in 2000, the same year its host abandoned fruit for Snow and Graphite, and was retired in favour of the Apple Pro Mouse: longer, unambiguous, and possessed of a front. The Pro Mouse was received, by an exhausted public, with relief bordering on gratitude. Its entire host record is a single machine across a two-year window in six colourways, and that tight coupling is part of the appeal to collectors now: to own a complete set of this specimen is, in effect, to own a complete colour history of the iMac G3 itself.

VI. Field Notes

Macworld named it “hockey puck” before Apple had finished naming it themselves, and the name outlived the product by decades, which is either an insult or the only species of immortality this Archive can confer. The naturalist records it as both.

Disculus confusus failed at the one task asked of every mouse since the mouse was invented: it did not reliably tell the hand which way to go. And yet it is collected today with something closer to affection than nostalgia usually allows, its six pelage variants sought as matched sets by people who own no working example and want one anyway. It is, on the specification sheet, a disappointment. It is, on the shelf, correct in every way that matters there. Both facts are entered, and neither is withdrawn.

Submitted to the Archive — Silicon Naturalist, Machinatia Division · Coordinates Withheld