Way back when

I first saw this sort of thing back in the mid-'90s.  Ted Selker's crew at IBM Almaden had
altered a Thinkpad keyboard to have two nubs, using the left one, in the most trivial example,
to operate a palette.  Selker is now at the MIT Media Lab.  He invented that nub thing in the
first place.  His group, and Joe Betts in particular, invented the tiny laptop power supply
that you think nothing of nowadays, but they (the power supplies, not his group) used to weigh
nearly as much as a laptop.  Joe Betts, now Joe Betts-Lacroix, seems to still be at Oqo.

At the time they only seemed interested in jimmying support for dual pointers into MSWin95.  X
was a dead end, although even then you could get Thinkpads with three "mouse" buttons.  Of
course at the time Apple was foredoomed, and in any case was probably trying to find ways to
get along with fewer axes, not use more.