André Guignard's Dépraz mouse was Logitech's breakthrough hit, a three-buttoned hemispherical ergonomic pain dome. But the forty-year-old clicker has its aficionados, and John Floren has published detailed instructions on wiring one up to USB.
I opened the mouse up several times over the course of my experimentation. The first time, I immediately noticed two things: the red plastic shell was quite heavy just by itself, and that there was a big piece of duct tape on the inside of the shell. Curious, I peeled back the tape.At first, I thought they were pieces of beer cans, but then I pulled some out and realized that they were wine capsules, the official name for those pieces of foil which go over the cork of a bottle of wine. It turns out that up into the 1980s, these wine capsules were actually made of lead, not the lightweight foil we get these days. Someone had put them inside the mouse, presumably to add a bit more heft–which I do find quite pleasant.
