Once upon a time, long before smartphones or even laptops were ubiquitous, the computer mouse was new, and it was thrilling. The 1984 Macintosh wasn’t the first machine to come with one, but it was the first to popularize the gizmo for ordinary people. Proper use of the mouse was not intuitive. Many people had a hard time moving and clicking at the same time, and “double-clicking” was a skill one had to learn. Still, anyone could put a hand on the thing, move it around on a table, and see the results on-screen: A little cursor moved along with you. “Pointing is a metaphor we all know,” Steve Jobs told Playboy in 1985. The mouse was central to the computer’s populist future, which wasn’t yet assured at the time. But the Mousing Age that followed didn’t last for very long. By the 2010s, the device was clearly in a steep decline. It never went away, of course; the computer-peripherals giant Logitech still nets some $750 million in yearly sales of “pointing devices.” But the …