Many many years ago the common household computer mouse didn't feature fancy laser-motion technology that enabled it to function on any old desktop surface, settee arm, or knee. They didn't jump to action at a moments notice just because you told them to do something shouting "Yes, Mr Curator, sir! Eek eek eek!". Oh no indeedy. They were, in fact, complete bastards. You see, they used to have a little hole in the bottom containing a small solid metal ball-bearing coated in grey rubber. This ball would spin in the opposite direction to the motion of the mouse, and interacted with a series of wheels and rollers around the inside surface that, in turn, controlled the cursor on your monitor. This proved very useful in enabling you to navigate your pointer over to the close button on Clippy, the anthropomorphic paperclip that Microsoft Office assured us was meant as an "assistant" with completely straight faces.
The drawback of this analogue technology, was that not only was a decent level of friction required between the mouse ball and the surface underneath it, but that dust, lint and poppadom fragments would often end up inside the mouse ball vestibule, resulting in a halted and jittery cursor movement, and eventually, complete mouse death. To fix this you needed to open the mouse up from underneath, remove the ball, and attack the little wheels and rollers with a set of tweezers, a toothpick or, ironically, a mutilated paperclip. However, to minimise the length of time spent hacking away at an electronic computer mouses internal mechanisms- prying out black, dense, curly flecks of god-knows-what material half-way to becoming some sort of modern day coal substitute- some bright spark came up with the idea of using a specially designed portable surface. A surface that not only imparted a high level of friction on the mouse ball for maximum spin efficiency, but that was also easily wipe-cleanable.
It was due to this that suddenly the majority of households and offices on Earth found themselves inundated with small, thin, square pieces of foam, sort of like what you might use as extra padding alongside packing paper. People went absolutely crazy for these things. They made them in their billions. Every single film, TV show, computer game, book series, sports team, clothing label, perfume brand, highstreet shop, car manufacturer, political party, school, college, corporation, company, business and Big Issue salesman had their own mouse matt. They were everywhere. Expensive ones, free ones, fancy ones, plain ones, padded ones, round ones, soft ones, shiny ones... and at its peak, the mouse matt diversity rivaled even that of Beanie Babies.
In this particular case from 2001, the small, thin, square piece of foam is painted red and has Red Dwarf written on it.
But every rise must have a fall, and pretty soon the humble computer mouse evolved into the laser-infused piece of high-tech gadgetry that we all know today, and these small, thin, square pieces of foam became completely and utterly useless again. Nowadays they represent nothing more a peculiar flash-in-the-pan oddity that most humans are rightly rather embarrassed over, don't like to talk about, and all-in-all try to pretend never actually happened. But here at The Unofficial Red Dwarf Online Museum, we remember. Oh yes. We remember.