Jack Hawley's Unstoppable Computer Mouse
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- čas přidán 12. 12. 2021
- Remember ball mice? Remember how much they sucked? Yeah, me neither. Remarkably reliable, they were - but see, that's 'cause none of us tried to use the coolant basin on our mill as a mousepad. For the few and proud who like their mousing sloppy, there's a solution from the forgotten depths of the 80s. Read on to find out what that could mean.
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I've got the Honeywell version myself and it really is nuts how well it functions on various surfaces. Though I had no idea how far it could actually go, ha!
Once again, great work on the research and explanation of how it works.
I thought I was cool for finding a Logitech ball mouse at CR packaged with Windows 3.0 on 5 1/4 floppies.
LGR PERIPHERAL HYPE
Does it have the same issues as in this video?
Do you have the same tracking issue?
you two, CRD and LGR are my fave sources for retro nostalgia... both transport me right in front of my IBM, 100MHz Pentium with 8MB RAM. The kicker was the single MB Cirrus Logic card pushing it all along... oh, the days! Endlessly playing Cyberia, Descent, Duke...
Since the wheels are magnetically springy, then in theory this mouse should be able to work on a vertical surface, or even upside down, positions in which ball mice really can't function. I wonder if one of the use case scenarios the designer had in mind was potentially NASA using them in space.
Holy crap you're right
@@CathodeRayDude NASA though simply relies now on Lenovo Thinkpads, with both the nub and a touchpad to use for the pointer. No mice at all.
@@SeanBZA weight rules space (when you're living in a gravity well)
Now we need the ultimate test: Will it work upside down on oiled teflon?
yes, one fun way for bored students at my school library to use the computers was to flip the mouse upside down and twiddle the two little wheels like an etch-a-sketch.
Finally, I can use oiled Teflon as a mouse pad! Livin' the dream.
LOL add some RGB and you gotta regular 'pro gamer' speed pad for playin the same game they play over and over and over and over and over and over... and then get banned for hacking at it... shit.. now were gonna see teflon mouse pads with RGB... the thought is out in the universe... nvm teflon feet...
And now all I can think about is all those birds that fell out of the sky like a hail storm when they guy at the Dupont factory opened the vent shaft... true story.
@@jakedill1304 it wasn't a vent shaft it was a pressure container filled with TFE (tetrafluoroethylene) for experiments to create CFC's and Roy J. Plunkett was the chemist how saw that the pressure had dropped leading to the thought of the gas escaping but as the container was weighed there was no difference so the gas hadn't escaped so he examinated the container and found the withe wax like Teflon (trade name) but yeah testing the propertys of a new material is for sure exciting especially with such a polymer like PTFE
@@jakedill1304 hey we have the same color!
I'm proud to do my part to further typecast CRD as Weird Mouse Dude. I sent him that Honeywell mouse a few weeks ago; I originally found it years ago in a surplus yard, along with some Model Ms. I immediately recognized the Model Ms and snatched them up, but the mouse looked unremarkable until I turned it over and went "whaaa". I had thought about doing a video on it myself over the years, but I'm glad I sent it to CRD as he did a much better job than I ever could have.
Oh man. In college, we lusted after that mouse, but they were priced just out of reach. We all used the DEC puck version, and loved how they worked.
Thank you for this great contribution.
Legend
Definitely a legend
100% sure this man could club someone to death with his massive pen-is. Love the channel.
Seeing the Teflon test absolutely shocked me. I've actually had experience with ball mice on an oily surface from working graveyard shifts at manufacturing places that just don't care. I remember I spent like a solid hour one day cleaning the job posting desk and making it free of chips and oil, and absolutely taking care of that ball mouse and cleaning it with IPA to come in the next day and have it looked just as trashed. I'd have killed for one of these mice.
Just out of curiosity, Is there any reason you couldn't have say, just lightly cleaned the surface, then used your own mousepad, perhaps one you brought to and from home? (and maybe put something disposable like paper or cardboard under that to protect the mousepad from gunking up over time?)
Regardless, wow that must have been incredibly frustrating to deal with, especially before you can finally get to actually doing your job. Screw those guys.
Good news: You can!
JK of course
@@littleboyred1 it was just for posting jobs. Mostly ran on a Mill at night. It was less effort for me to navigate by keyboard than to bring in a mousepad for a shit job I didn't really care about.
@@moonchild4806 still should have chewed the ass of the people on other shifts, they knew exactly what TF they just did to you
@@kingmasterlord I was the new girl and nobody would listen to me. I'm out of that job now
"had he done it in 1971, when the ball-mouse was still *gaining traction* "... i see what you did there...
jens, you beat me to it! lol!
That would have been great for computing on a glass coffee table. Unlike a ball mouse, you don't have to worry if there is water on the surface. Unlike an optical mouse, it should actually work.
As long as it's clean the cheap ball mouse will work and there's laser mouse too 4 all your glass needs thought it most likely came much later.
I'm glad my father bought a Microsoft optical mouse in the 90s red and white, it looked amazing and never failed, was a breeze playing games with it and it still looks kinda modern...
czcams.com/video/Ed1mXV9hNl8/video.html this is the proof of concept that I was talking about.
@@guily6669 that has to be the intellimouse which they still make today
@@guily6669I have a lazer mouse, it kinda works on glass, in the sense it traks when it is moved, but it's so not precise, that it's basically unusable without the mouspad
That oiled-plastic test was honestly crazy, I too thought there was no way that would work. Actually the tests remind me a lot of vacuum salesmen, y'all remember those, coming into your home, dropping a bag of dust and then showing off how well the newest models would do? If I'm this impressed by a mechanical mouse in 2021, I can only imagine that any IT or office worker back in the day would've had their mind absolutely blown.
i cannot BELIEVE it actually rolled on oiled almost-teflon
Rolled and didn't appear to affect tracking at all.
The demonstration was informative and impressive, and Mr. Dude's reaction was great too.
Probs thanks to the magnets that the youtuber dismissed as cheap.
@@WhenDoesTheVideoActuallyStart I mean, they probably were cheaper, but sometimes the cheaper solution is the better one (especially when it involves fewer moving parts)
I checked the references for Telefunken's proto-mouse. Long story short: Yeah, it checks out.
Trackballs were first developed and used with air traffic control radar screens. An American company was marketing them for this purpose by 1966. Around the same time, Telefunken was working on such a system for the German government, and was evidently also using trackballs.
In parallel, they were developing a version of the ATC console and screen as a terminal for their next mainframe computer. It was also to have some kind of cursor-based input device, but a trackball didn't seem an optimal solution, since it just wouldn't be flexible enough. One of the engineers, Rainer Mallebrein, quipped that you could hardly expect users to cut holes into their tables to install trackballs. As you said, he had the idea to just flip the whole thing on its head instead. He dates that thought to late 1966.
They had the thing ready by 1968: It appears, completely incidentally, in a report about display technology that the company put out. It's not even mentioned specifically or anything, but there is very clearly one sitting there in an illustration of the aforementioned terminal. The report was published 2nd October 1968; Mallebrein remembers that it was written months after work on the hardware had finished, which was probably early that year.
Evidently, Telefunken didn't seem to think the proto-mouse was all that special. They didn't even give it a new name, both it and the trackballs were referred to prosaically as a "Rollkugelsteuerung" or rolling ball control(er). Telefunken did apply for a patent, but were rejected by the patent office because the idea was not deemed sufficiently novel in comparison to a trackball. Looking back, Mallebrein blames this in part on them not arguing its advantages strongly enough in the patent application.
Technologically, the device was very simple, it just sent out the output of the two rotary encoders, which was interpreted by the computer terminal.
The proto-mouse (or RKS 100-86, to give its proper name) was offered as an optional extra alongside the TR 86 terminal and SIG 100 screen for the TR 440 mainframe system. Apparently not all customers opted to buy it, but at least as early as 1972, it was, quite literally, in the hands of users.
Ultimately, Telefunken only made 46 examples of the TR 440, which were primarily used by universities and scientific institutions. They seem to have been well liked, but were mostly out of service by the late 80s.
Here's the thing though: It does not seem like Telefunken's design was cloned. As I understand it, Xerox developed their ball mouse independently, working from Engelbart's version. Perhaps they had some influence from trackballs as well, who knows.
Telefunken's mouse seems to have just stayed in universities and computer labs, quietly vanishing alongside the mainframes and terminals. It wasn't rediscovered until 2009, when German computer historian Ralf Bülow dug it up in old Telefunken documentation.
It absolutely tickles me that there *must* be people who used an RKS 100-86 in university in the late 70s or early 80s, and owned a home computer with a mouse not *too* long after. Maybe they wondered what had been up with that old thing, or maybe they thought nothing of it and had no idea how far ahead of its time that clunky hemisphere really was.
Dankeschön!
Excellent post, in-depth info, thanks for researching the extra mile. I wanted to to help out mit der deutschen Seite von Wikipedia, aber I don’t think,it would have been this elaborate. Well done, sir!
thank you for this update! makes you wonder how much technology gets lost with time that just didn’t seem important enough by the people creating it, when it could’ve /would’ve revolutionised the world at a later date
The first mouse I used plugged into an Apple IIe. We had perhaps a thousand games on 5.25 inch floppy disks.
Hay its Tay! I just got super nostalgic thinking about your music. Hope you are well!
Wasn't the Apple II amazing?
Holy shit Tay Zonday
*It’s Tay Zonday
Thousand Games
5.25 inch floppy disk frames
Thousand Games
The Apple II e is what I had played
Thousand Games
The world we live in is not but man-made
Thousand Games
Only started with a player one
Thousand Games
Let them watch and say you both had fun
Thousand Games
The first mouse I used plugged in for their sake
Thousand Games
More than winning more than getting great
Thousand Games
Load one up and use it to escape
Excellent point about car controls. I work at an automotive museum; we have a car in the collection that we know for a fact no one on earth is capable of driving. It's the only survivor from a 1902 car company that made a whopping three vehicles, and the original owner, a descendant of the company's founder, knew how to use it and did not teach any of his children. It's so obscure we don't even have diagrams or manuals indicating what most of the (unlabelled) controls do.
I bet Jay Leno could drive it
I would be very curious to see this vehicle. Would you mind sharing the make/model? (assuming pictures of it even exist online)
@@iminthatweirdpartofyoutube2687 It's a 1903 Redpath Messenger. Not many good photos out there.
Surely a mechanic could examine the controls, follow their linkages, and figure out what they do.
@@danielch6662 Oh, sure, they could. Only problem is the vehicle was restored in the 70s, by restorators who left no notes. And if the mechanic makes even the slightest mistake dismantling the vehicle or testing it, that's it that's all, it's gone. After a certain point the historic value of learning how it works is overridden by the value of not having to say "ooops, we trashed a priceless historical treasure."
CRD: Oh god
CRD: Jack Hawley is invincible
CRD: we can't stop him
Jack Hawley: Jack Hawley
My highschool had those honeywell mice! They were really neat, very little cleaning needed, and you never got annoyed because some other student stole the ball from a ball mouse and now you couldn't use the computer. Primary school computers always had missing balls. Hell, I even stole a mouse ball once! They were fun, satisfyingly heavy soft rubber orbs!
and yeah they always had those slightly diagonal tracking issues, even when they were new. But for a library computer, nobody cared. It was a great mouse for that kind of simple office work
@@phxf It's actually neat remembering just how annoying ball mice were, in a cute sort of way. I was the only student in a school of 500+ who had the time to do mouse maintenance where I'd clean the internals and even re-align the pins that other students would bend from carelessly and blindly jamming the PS/2 plug into the back of AT computer towers. Those Honeywell mice sound like a dream for my past-me. :B
My inner primary school student got a laugh out of the term "missing balls".
@@darthmeow1370 I have testicual cancer found it funny as shit
As a service technician, I switched to the Honeywell wheel mouse and never looked back.
@@phxf laugh out loud
When I got rid of my last ball mouse I took a sledge hammer to it and turned it into powder, my god I hate ball mice.
As opposed to optical?
@@dynamicworlds1 the issue with optical is that the sensor has to be clean enough to see the surface, gunk (or dust) can get in there and just stop it working this mouse doesn't have that issue
@@AstoundingAmelia also optical mice get tripped out by things like wood grain, dirt, grime, all that and wont track right.
I really love that Jack Hawley guy. The picture of him smiling is the ultimate troll, and probably the first individual to successfully use l33t language in a trolling way to xerox. Probably the star of this episode 😅
Definitely a huckster.
If they had a scroll wheel, I'd go looking for one. If it can run on oiled plastic perfectly fine, I bet it would work on fabric bedspreads acceptably.
maybe not, it has to slip and grip at the same time, but idk
I've found that Microsoft's small optical mice (including that insane folding one) work exceptionally well on bedspreads.
@@no1DdC well yest but that's becasue theres zero moving parts and an optical mouse just calculates its position based on variations in the surface you're moving your mouse on and doesn't rely on friction to move.
Nowadays, the blue laser optical mice from Microsoft do an excellent job at coping with undesirable mousing surfaces. I've used one on pretty much every surface out there, including pets that wanted to remain in the way, and it just works. The only thing my very early BlueTrack mouse didn't contend with well was clean, clear glass. If the bottom was frosted or it was dirty, it managed, but if it was clean and clear, the pickups just didn't have enough data to work with. These sensors have gotten considerably better over the years, so I suspect the latest generation are actually quite capable even on glass.
@@victornpb My thoughts too. It will need a fairly stiff flat surface whatever it's made of.
I’m surprised this design didn’t come from some NII in Siberia, because it looks robust but janky in an exceptionally Soviet way, like a Lada Niva mouse
Yeah, this is the Lada of mice.
Robust, won't break, always works, _but only just._
Ah yes, the niva, the only car that breaks down easier if you drive it on the road instead of offroad.
Love my Lada 2101 and can definitely see the comparison
@@rockytom5889 The trick is to drive it at the same speed on the road as you would offroad.
I had a good feeling about this thing the second I saw the Honeywell name on your example. They may not be an incredibly significant name from a consumer perspective, but in this mouse's era they were a big player in defense, aerospace, manufacturing, and industrial control, and I think they wouldn't have chosen this design unless they were convinced it was superior for the hostile environments it would be expected to operate in. Another reply suggested they might have been thinking about space use, and that's a possibility, but I'd also bet they were thinking about things like airplanes and submarines as well.
I remember the first time I saw The Mother of All Demos... It literally brought tears to my eyes, seeing such forward thinking... It awed me to see what they had achieved using such limited hardware back then. The hypertext links, the graphics, windowing, even remote collaboration with videoconferencing... My mind was blown by men who truly saw the future of computing. They saw the present over a decade before I even existed!
IT WORKS ON ANYTHING
Hey, My Father worked for Honeywell in the 90s, I have a rare demo version which does have a clear case with fan like patterns on the top of the "Drums"
interesting video to see after all these years :)
oh that's TERRIFIC!
Speaking on the AMC inline 6 front, my aunt picked me up from school a really long time ago in a Jeep Cherokee. I noticed the oil light flickering.
I told her she needed to pull over since there was no oil in the engine and she said "it's fine it's been doing that for months".
That engine is still running 17 years later.
Running without oil is not the same thing as the oil sensor being faulty.
What you have done here is fallen for a fallacy.
@@UnitSe7en I didn't wanna explain the whole timeline of the engine abuse but I did imply the point.
Confirmed via dipstick later it was about 3 quarts low.
@@kloroformd that's still 2 quarts of fine lubricant
My dad did something similar to our 04 explorer once. Poor soul went about 3k with almost no lubricant. It's still kicking without an engine rebuild at 225K miles. Transmission actually gave up first at 190K.
@@UnitSe7en Maybe but that being said that engine lasted for well over 30 years. I owned one made in 1982 and I can tell you that I drove it with absolutely no fluids, (no coolant, oil, trans fluid etc.) for over an hour after destroying the oil pan and much of the under carriage and transmission housing. The oil pan was all but non-existent as I had sheared the bolts right off. The engine was still running when I scrapped the car, still without fluids. Those engines are well known as one of the most durable engines ever made.
8:45 That beige iMac from 1989 is amazing. Darn shame we'll never see a full-length video about it.
Man, I'd love to own some weird anachronistic beast like that thing! XD
Wouldn't care if it were a retro themed iMac, or an iMac themed retro Mac... But man, I think I'd _prefer_ the iMac themed retro Mac, if I had a choice... Give it a nice 68040 motherboard, keep the same CRT, and man, that'd be a sweet spot for retro Mac gaming!
@@richfiles if you want an oddball Macintosh, find a G3 All In One, aka "The Molar" or G3 AIO. It was sold to the education market and is the immediate predecessor to the CRT iMac.
IIRC the G3 AIO was based on the 2nd and 3rd revisions of the Beige G3 desktop and tower, so you won't a Molar with the IDE limitations nor the worst ATi video chip the first version Beige G3 has. IIRC the IDE issues can be fixed by using a ROM SIMM from a 2nd or 3rd revision but the only way to get around the poor video chip is to use one of the precious few three PCI slots.
Then there's the Macintosh known as the "Power Express". It made it to the engineering sample stage, which for Apple was nearly always identical to production. then Steve Jobs came back, took one look at all the goodies on the PE which No Mac Had Before (like built in Ultra SCSI) and said "Kill it.". And it was dead, because if there's one thing Steve *hated* it was a computer having "too much" hardware expandability. I suspect that when a Power Express is in working order, it's one of the most kickass computers for the Classic Mac OS, especially with its ability to use very fast storage without needing 3rd party drive controllers.
@@greggv8 I recall a few of the "Molars" at the Science Museum of Minnesota, many many moons ago.
I service CNC controllers and let me tell you I've seen some still working with 3 inches of dust and metal chips covering the whole inside of the electrical enclosure
back in HS (1996-2000) I had classmates that stole the balls out of the classroom computer mice, making them useless. In schools, that was the downside of ball mice.😐
Ours all had the cover glued shut to prevent this. I'm guessing they died quicker from stolen balls than they did from lack of cleaning.
Hell yeah, you could then chuck them at classmates. They hurt but didn't do much damage as they were rubber covered.
I was one of those kids
@@pypes84 a girl with overactive parents got hurt by a mousr ball when i was a kid and they stopped us using the computer lab for quake 3 during lunch break :/
I love that as soon as we invented the ball mouse, we wanted something better.
"This new "mouse" invention is genius! But oh my god does it SUCK can we get something better?"
Even today we complain about everything soon as it comes out
Sometimes even before then
I would LOVE to see the next CS:GO tournament be ball-mouse only...
That would be some real entertainment!
@@Reth_Hard
funnily enough, ps2 ball mice are technically more accurate than even modern optical sensors if you flick them across the desk quickly enough.
but the speeds that comes into effect at are not useful unless your arm is moved by servoes.
and of course they still suck at normal movements.
when u showed the mouse has 2 feet i was waiting for a 2 of them :(
I SCREWED UP
There are pots that don't have a stop and will just roll over to the other end of their resistance value if you keep turning them so it's possible that it just looked at whether the value was increasing or decreasing and knew where the value would roll over and accounted for that.
Or it just tied the resistance values to X,Y coordinates.
@@randgrithr7387 This is what I would do. Unfortunately that would mean a non-square aspect ratio would require some weird stuff inside.
@@DigitalJedi Or you can just map it to a square area and clamp the cursor inside the screen in software.
The 'Driving Controller' on the Atari VCS / 2600 could rotate endlessly, whereas the visually similar 'Paddle' controller had a fixed degree of rotation left and right.
@@DiThi considering the time period and general disposition of programmers that's exactly what they did. 😂
Why bother making it an engineering problem when you can just ignore the major problem with software.
Not like you'll be using this design for decades, right? (Incidentally the reason we had so many terrible standards, as we all know)
Funny, I'd never seen one of these before until relatively recently, I saw one of the puck-shaped DEC ones sitting on a shelf in the back room of a computer museum in Pennsylvania a few months ago. It was missing the wheels, the bottom just had two little metal axles sticking out, which made it even more perplexing, but I took a picture so I could look into it when I got home. But even as I was reading about it I was thinking: "there's absolutely going to be a CRD video about this thing at some point."
Hooray for visual aids, I feel engaged!
I noticed the advert read "a division of Hawley labs." I wonder what other lost to time wacky adventures he was on.
I used the one of those back in the day, that exact Honeywell model in fact, and I found it had exactly the same sticking issue.
It was still better than a gummed up ball mouse, but at the time I definitely preferred a clean ball mouse - especially for small and accurate movement.
Thank you for the confirmation! I absolutely love it when I post one of these videos and someone shows up who has first hand experience, it really pulls things together.
If you find yourself missing the days of cleaning "mouse droppings" out of roller ball mice, try the logitech optical trackball range! All the precision of a lovely trackball, all the satisfaction of cleaning some grot out occasionally, but when it needs cleaning it doesn't start to skip and become unusable, it just gets a bit slow/stiff.
May I suggest (one of) the holy grails of trackballs if you like the logi stuff so much?
Kensington expert series. You won't look back at logi again. Thumb and smaller trackballs are behind when it comes to ergo and accuracy of a large ball. I've tried the logi ergo or whatever the latest elevation adjustable one is. It's neat but just not as smooth as the larger stuff sadly.
I've owned multiple Logitech mice and nothing holds up like their old MX700, that thing is still working nearly 2 decades later. Their newer stuff though isn't built as well nor does it last me as long, from personal experience. Everyone has different stories. But definitely do check out the Kensington Expert series they are the gold standard for professional trackballs and I see them everywhere in high end entertainment/film/CAD/etc for a reason.
I always wondered what all that "dirt" was? I mean was mouse pads really that dirty..
@@stiannobelisto573 Usually dust, which has a high percentage of... dead human skin cells. Even if you cleaned the mouse pad regularly, any time between cleanings was enough to gather some dust.
@@stiannobelisto573 dead skin cells and hand oil mostly
One of the reasons to use a magnet here is the push force onto the surface, which allows the mouse to grip in these weird conditions.
The mouse would be amazing in industrial environments though! But most HMIs for industrial machine use track balls.
Man, imagine the magnets sucking up all the filings and chips and stuff in such a place, though.
That is easy to fix, just add some metal to shield the magnetic field
Or they are touch screens. Or are dumb HMIs with dome function buttons. But track balls are popular in older settings.
@@akkudakkupl Resistive touch screens, if memory serves. The capacitive ones used on smartphones and tablets won't work with gloves unless they include condictive fibres, while the resisitive ones will, and can have extra layers of screen protection added on top without impacting functionality as well.
@@Roxor128 exactly.
I genuinely did not expect there to be yet another major instalment to this "weird mice" plot thread in the CRD universe but I am *here* for it.
Could there possibly be any more of these?
Only once he manages to get his hands on the mice from the Alto. Some of their attempts to deal with the ball dirtying so quickly was actually to use a slightly rubberized mousepad with a mouse whose trackball was a ball bearing. Just a rather massive stainless steel, chromed ball. The actual mechanism inside was pretty mundane, though, so no real surprises after the material change for the ball.
I was just thumbing through a PC magazine from the middle of 1990, as you do, and ran across an input device review. Typical price of a run of the mill mouse was around $150. So they were definitely not disposable commodities in 1986.
Bear in mind, in the mid 1990 computer magazine, there was _some_ talk about how this or that might change once people move over to a graphical environment like Microsoft’s Windows. The takeaway here is, at least in PC land, a mouse was still a very optional component. There were some apps that had screens shot in Windows/386, but Win 3.0 hadn’t even made it to the party yet, and 3.0 is when anybody actually cared about that Windows thing what took up all the memory in a computer.
So I would propose that, more than likely, what led to the demise of this strange design is not the cost, but the fact that it was going up against other established manufacturers that had solid distribution channels, in a market that was mostly apathetic.
Both Logitech and Microsoft were deep in the game in ‘90, for example. The product probably died from lack of oxygen, since anybody who even cared about graphical environments enough to have a mouse would get one from the vendor that made their keyboard, or made their barcode scanner, or their OS - and probably never realized this weird thing even existed.
That number seems high, to be honest. I'm curious what magazine you're looking at and what their angle is. PC Mag Apr 15 1986 has mice between $104-140 (major name brands) and PC Mag Jul-Aug 1990 (both avail on goog books if you wanna compare notes) has them as low as $50 for a Tandy two-button. If we're talking high-end, sure, they get outrageous, $300+, but by 1990 (hell, by 1983!) "run of the mill", in the context of PC hardware, meant just what it does now - "some Taiwan fly-by-night you've never heard of." The clone market was beyond massive, people were buying no-name garbage with a scoop and a scale, as far as I can tell the prices on even mildly-named garbage were already largely in the double-digits. These are just the PC Mag prices; I'm certain if you were at the _Computer Show And Sale!_ buying a mouse in a ziploc out of a huge bin, you could get em for $30. And, of course, all that's moot - because, yeah, your PC came with a mouse! Or your OS (I have a copy of Win 3 with a packed-in Logitech... or is it a Logitech with a packed-in Win 3?), or your CAD software, or your word processor, or... or... or... Except for the most discerning of individuals, mice had become fungible, invisible; if you were supposed to have one, you did.
@@CathodeRayDude PC World, June 1990, page 169. I don't think PCW is readily available in the digital archives, but it's a buyer's guide to keyboards, mice, trackballs, etc.
The Mouse section isn't _quite_ as bad as I remembered from a couple days back when I was reading this. The Logitech Series 9 Mouse and Microsoft Mouse were both about $150, although TBF, the Logitech had quite a range of prices depending on the interface -- as low as $109 -- and the MS Mouse did ship with a copy of Paintbrush (reader service number 680, if you want to get in on that deal.) So there's that. And these _are_ list prices, so pre-Internet, maybe assume 20% less street.
There were cheaper options, many in the $80-110 range, and even a couple at $50. The trackball list is a little more like what I was thinking of, where they average in the mid $100 range.
At this point (mid 90), I don't know if I had actually used a mouse yet. The Mac had one since 84, and there were a few early computers that would use one if you had it. But we had a C64, with a software package called GEOS. It was a graphical environment that had the usual desktop software bundle trimmings, but I think its main purpose was to teach you patience. It could make use of a mouse, but it hadn't really even occurred to me that it was something you might do, since the keyboard UI was 100% functional and you could use a cheap light pen to draw. I remember asking about something in the manual, and my dad had to explain to me, "oh that uses something called a mouse."
It wasn't until we got a 386 running Windows 3.0 that I ever really used one -- and I remember it being in the neighborhood of $80 to replace. Which I found out when I scraped out all the "gunk", and it turned out that gunk was a textured surface applied to the steel rollers so they could grip the ball.
@@nickwallette6201 that's fascinating context. Don't get me wrong, I had no doubt that the majority of people who used computers never used a mouse before Windows 95, but frankly I had imagined that people were more or less familiar with them even if they hadn't used one. Either way, I think your point stands that mice were not fungibly inexpensive for the average individual - but I think maybe that's the rub, because I was thinking more in terms of business use, where the mouse would have shown up much earlier than for most consumers, and costs for necessary tools were thought of more in terms of thousands of dollars a year than dozens. If the hawley mouse was under 80 bucks, then it was probably competitive with what a CNC machine shop might have been buying, but I feel like the thing was probably upwards of 100, and not competitive with those bargain basement mice, especially since there are other hazards in the shop that were just as capable of destroying a mouse in its entirety, regardless of the cleverness of its tracking system. If your guys keep dropping mice and rolling the forklift over them, you're going to want to buy the cheapest possible unit. I think that's the kind of scenario I was imagining.
@@nickwallette6201 also the anecdote at the end there is tragic and hilarious
@@CathodeRayDude That's generally what I aim for. haha
You could be right about the cause, though I still see it as a casualty of obscurity.
Here's why, if you're interested enough:
Having not been employed in the 80s, but an avid computer magazine reader from the 90s (and now revisiting them with the benefit of a few decades of historical context), it _seems_ the majority of business use on PCs was text-based.
The tips and tricks section of that (and every, at the time) issue covers dBase, 1-2-3, Word Perfect, Microsoft Word and Excel... but not so much Word/Excel for Windows. The columns are all plumb with sequences like "+ C, D" that they suggest recording as macros to make repetitive tasks easier. Nary a "click OK" to be found.
There was a whole review of the products in the "Groupware" space -- e-mail, calendaring, task tracking -- all the stuff that basically collapsed into Outlook. All of that was text-based too (with "memory resident" support for hotkey access!), and the UI coherency (or lack thereof) was a big part of the scoring.
Of course, the CAD people were a different subject entirely. And I would assume the coincidence of mice and floating-point co-processors was probably nearly 1:1. But that probably would've been still a bit of a niche. Perhaps a largish niche. The "teflon and oil" thing does seem to imply that maybe this was the imagined customer, although how much CNC operation was being done from a graphical UI in 87? And how many of the CAD engineers were working from the manufacturing floor? That's just a bizarre tidbit any way you dice it. :-)
Moving on...
In the section of that review on mice, the article says this: "All the products in the mice table are compatible with Microsoft's two-button rodent and should work with programs like Windows, Ventura Publisher, and PC Paintbrush." So add desktop publishing to that niche, for those that were brave enough to stray from their Apple orchard. Maybe it was machine oil to lubricate the printers? * shrug *
So, how about a look at what was on the top shelf of hardware at the time? There's a review of three brand new 486DX/25 PCs, where they were compared to current-gen 386DX/33 PCs. They listed an AST Premium, IBM Model 70, and NCR PC486. Standard configuration: "486 at 25MHz, 4MB RAM, 110MB HDD, 1.2 or 1.4MB floppy drive, VGA and VGA color monitor, at least one parallel and serial port, 101-key keyboard, and DOS 3.3 or later." No mouse.
IMO, it all seems to paint a picture that they weren't really in widespread use yet. Actually walking down the halls of a well-financed company might differ, I dunno. All I have is what I can read now, and that's obviously going to be catering to some kind of target audience.
So, anyway, that's why I think it probably wasn't so much a cost factor that held the Hawley mouse back. I mean, sheesh, those 486s were $11k to $15k. That's quite a figure, and quite a spread. What's another $200, plus or minus 50%?
The mouse review _did_ actually point out the difference between mechanical and optical mice -- namely that optical mice didn't need to be cleaned, but cost a lot more and required a special mouse pad. I have no evidence to back this theory up, but I bet that if that Hawley mouse had been prolific enough to be on anyone's radar, it would've found some footing on that benefit alone ... before eventually falling by the wayside, which was probably inevitable unless they licensed the technology generously.
I mean, users clearly weren't afraid to try new things. For gosh sakes, that review covered a model with 40 buttons (!!) on it, for macro recall, listed at $249. (Prohance Technologies PowerMouse 100, in case you're wondering.)
That ended up being well more than 2c worth, sorry. :-D
Great job, really love the video. I definitely got a kick out of the fact that the mouse worked a lot better than you expected in the oil condition.
There was a metal version of this mouse, used in Healthcare and automotive. I had one, and you always used it on a fabric mouse pad, the wheels did have some grip to them. Failure mode was any rotation and replacing the mouse pad every so often. Used it for years until intelimouse was released...
Thanks for uploading this! I found a Honeywell Hawley mouse at a thrift store for $2.00 last month and it ended up being one of my favorite purchases, lol.
From the thumbnail, I thought this was going to be the "2 balled mouse" that I dreamed up as a child in the 80s. With 2 balls, you could sense the rotation of the mouse as well as the X, Y movement. I once taped 2 serial mouses together and wrote a demo in Borland Turbo Basic to move a beach ball on the screen and have it rotate when you rotated my well hung Franken-mouse. Good times!
I wonder if you could do that with today's optical mouse technology? Figuring out movement is all done using image processing inside the mouse, so it seems like it might be possible to devise new firmware to look for rotation as well as translation.
Potential obstacles:
1. Hardware flexibility. Is the image processing done by an ASIC or a generic microprocessor? If the latter, is it fast enough to do the more complex processing?
2. Needing new USB packets for the rotation information that can be ignored by drivers that don't understand them.
3. Needing new rotation-aware drivers for the OS and ways to pass the rotation information to programs.
Imagining the PC cursor rotate like the wii remote pointer looks extremely cursed in my head
The Mother of All Demos is an awesome presentation. It's movie-length though. You can also check out the MIT Sketchpad presentation by Ivan Sutherland from 1963. There you can see the input device that was around before the mouse: the lightpen.
We all appreciate the glitter demo sacrifice you made. I remember the problem of mouse balls being stolen at school, optical solved that problem too. Thanks CRD!
I never thought of that... I'm sincerely shocked my high school didn't have mouse ball theft problems in the 90s. And I worked part-time in the print shop/desktop publishing room my senior year. I was the person scraping crud off the rollers, so I would have been the person replacing the balls too. I suspect the kids in my school didn't know, or care enough to discover, that the balls could come out.
What were they doing with them after stealing them?
@@dynamicworlds1 Mostly nothing, kids just being vandals.
Instead of doing school, I watched a 27 minute video about computer mice.
And I'm not disappointed.
I love this channel so much
I show the Mother Of All Demos to all the junior programmers I mentor to inspire them to get their brain juices flowing.
The tracking thing really kills this thing taking off.... Anyone that relied on their mouse back then to daily drive something like CAD or whatnot no doubt would be looking for something that didn't clog up because of the tracking issues the clogging causes... But after using this thing once would probably describe it as "always clogged". Since the clogging causes more or less exactly the tracking issues this seems to have.
for those sorts of technical drawing applications, vertical and horizontal movement precision is important but ever so slightly diagonal isn't really. When I used this mouse regularly, i noticed the tracking issue, but it never really got in the way.
my dad used one of those for cad and it presumably was fine since he favoured it over anything else, but i do remember it doing the tracking thing so idk, i have a vague memory there was some muscle memory move one automatically did to unstick it or something, but this is deep childhood ephemera so might be misremembering.
yea, only applacation looks like in industrial facilties that might ofton not be so clean and therefore an always slightly clogged but never fulyl clogged mosue was better than one that fulyl clogs but is unclogged off the bat.
You are on a roll with the mouse tech videos, and I am enjoying them immensely
I see what you did there
The amount of times I've rewatched your videos because they're so good and after a long enough time I'll forget most of what the video was about. You must have such good engaging content that I can either watch with 100% attention or just use as background noise when I'm doing shit. You've been my favourite CZcamsr for about six months and I've watched almost every video of yours except for the really old ones.
Thank you so much -_-
You know, this mouse actually has an advantage over optical mice as well. Dust and surface type can make it so that optical mice can’t operate effectively. Meanwhile this mouse can in almost any circumstance.
I disagree with your assessment of the magnet. Precisely because of how small are the forces involved, any drag you cause is terrible. Basically, if you replaced that with a loaded spring it would skip more often, specially in situations where too little (ie: people who used to "mouse glide") or too much force are involved.
Edit: seeing the rest of the experiment, you can see why using friction fit (ball mouse's favourite engagement) goes wrong for the planned design of that crazy crazy guy.
Conclusion: when everything fails... MAGNETS! :)
You are very right about the car analogy. But have you noticed that lately the trend of knowing how to drive one, can drive all is reversing - for some reason now its very trendy to "ruin" this by removing the shifter or changing the shape of the steering wheel or removing blinker stocks (or any other feature that has existed for like 70 years) and replacing it with something unnecessarily stupid.
Yeah I agree, and bmw is responsible. They're the dumbasses that put a bunch of critical flight surface controls on a *knob* twenty years ago
Soon your car will lock up when there is no Internet access and refuse to start to "protect you"
@@DevideNull I usually eyeroll a bit but yeah. Yep. It is unquestionably coming.
@@CathodeRayDude subscription based car feature access is becoming a thing. Tesla is already doing it with some functions. BMW or Mercedes has a vehicle where they expect owners to pay an ongoing fee to use their heated seats. Toyota is apparently thinking about making people pay to use their remote start/entry key fob. czcams.com/video/GLlzAv2GTdc/video.html
So glad I found your channel today dude!! Love your content and how you do your videos. I can easily watch every second of your videos not only because I’m very interested in everything you do videos about, but you do it in a way that keeps my attention. Keep it up I’m here for it!
I've only found this channel a couple days ago in my recommended list, I've watched a few vids and I'm shocked this guy does not have more subs.. lots of valuable informative info and it reads as a genuine interest in his subject matter vs. trying to make "trendy" vids. keep up the good work!
Hey man, I only discovered your channel a few months ago, but holy shit you do good work. Fantastic content.
I know the Honeywell versions of these mouses saw some use for a long time. My school system bought a ton of these, and a few schools in the district used them broadly all the way through the 2000s, and they *still* are present in a handful of science classrooms and labs at least up until everything went remote last year. I haven't been in any of the buildings since, but I can't imagine they'd have swapped them out.
Thank you for this. I really love your enthusiasm, research, and also your very thoughtful speculation. The not-Teflon demo was mind boggling.
Your personality makes these videos that much better. I'm glad I stumbled upon your channel. It cures my nerd boredom in between trades very nicely.
This is such an awesome channel
In the 90s and early aughts, one of these would have been a significant QoL improvement for me over the ball mice I was using. Even now, if I had one of these available to buy at anything other than collectors-item prices and with USB interface, I'd probably still use my optical as a daily-driver, but I'd keep this thing hooked up, and would use it fairly regularly for stuff that I currently muddle through with constantly having to stop what I'm doing to clean lint out of the optical window.
I switched to IR mice years ago and never looked back. With the cheaper ones you can track strangely while in-air but that doesn't matter when you never have to clean the contact and they work as long as you can physically move the mice. The expensive IR mice use software to negate the weird in-air tracking but I've never actually had issue with it with the high-DPI settings I use.
@@sf4137 Mine is IR. It still gets flaky an unresponsive if there's a speck of fiber-fil in the window, or if the lens gets a grease smudge
Your delivery and presentation is sooooooo good and entertaining! Keep it up Dude!
The DECstations at my University all had the Hawley version puck. They worked extremely well.
When you actually tested the oiled Teflon claim I lost it 🤣
Your videos rock man I love this stuff!
It would have been a waste of time if I didn't actually go through with it! The man set a challenge! Now the truth of his claims will be remembered! Thanks for watching, haha
When you need a mechanical mouse to go to pride with, but are too afraid your glitter and lubricant covered hands will make it impossible to use your Amiga mid-parade
16:17 “…in 1971 when the ball mouse was still gaining traction…” you meaning losing traction. The ball mouse was ALWAYS losing traction from the moment you cleaned it.
Dude! You're channel just continues to GROW and as it should! Such a wealth of information! Love these videos brother! 🤘😊
there was one of those honeywell mice hanging around my house as a kid, i remember playing with the little feet waiting for stuff to load (pokemon red in an emulator most likely), i think it worked pretty well, hence it still being in use by my dad 1998 or there abouts, right up until optical mice were plentiful if i remember rightly
I have one of the Honeywell types like he is showing and I loved that mouse. I use a M570 Logi track ball these days (and bought extras so when they discontinue it I'll have plenty to last) but this Honeywell was my favorite and he's right, I never had to clean it and it was the only mouse that I owned that could draw a straight line.
Get a Kensington expert one day, thank me later. They are even better BUT that said, a group of very good machinists I have worked with actively go out and try to find NOS M570s though, as they love the ergo/design for their particular use. I bet I could convert them to a Kensington though, I'll try next time :)
I just freaking love this channel. Thorough, not rushed, niche, great presentation.
I love these deep dives! Thanks.
This was a great video.
Unfortunately you've inspired me to build my own indestructible mouse like this.
I don't need one, but now I want a wireless one I can take everywhere.
Have your videos always been licensed CC? I just noticed it for the first time in the end card of this one. Not surprised you'd do something like that, but very cool to see :)
Yep! Anyone who's gonna steal em is gonna do it anyway but for anyone whose work can benefit from mine, I want it to be clear that they're free to use it
I'm so glad I found this channel. You sir, are an A-class nerd. I thought my own collection of old hardware was weird, but you definitely won the mouse round. I can't wait to find out what else you have in store!
the mother of all demos blew my mind the first time i watched it! engelbart and everyone involved in making that demo happen did an incredible job
Most people can ignore this comment I just want to have a record somewhere that I sub to this guy when he was at 61k. I'll use it to reference back to when he hits 1 million plus because this guy does amazing work and puts a lot of effort into his stuff.
Also it impresses me that I can never fully tell what decade you're in because of your background. It's somewhere between 1990 and 2020.
@@Mrkenjoe1 Your not taking metaphysics into that equation... common mistake.
I actually had a mechanical rotary encoder in one of my serial mice for PC. Sadly don't think I have that one anymore, but I think it was a knockoff of the Microsoft Mouse 2.0
"its a mouse, and it [mouses]" That was a great line.
I rarely actually laugh aloud watching a video... success.
Best video on the mouse period 😊❤️really appreciate the lengths you went to to make this!!
A reverse pedal is exactly the reason why I still have trouble driving and video games within analog controller, that's not how cars work gamers.. that's not how they work..I miss the days when freeform controllers had common support or rebindability in video games and didn't have to use Auto hotkey workarounds... Funny, I can almost peg it right to the release of the Xbox 360 no shit! Suddenly my joystick stopped working in video games.. suddenly there was a picture of an Xbox 360 controller in all games.. suddenly you couldn't button map it in all video games.. not all but most, now at least we have injector workarounds LOL and retro gaming is such a thing that there are things to make things work.. but for someone not in the technical know-how back in the old days, dark fucking times dark fucking times..
Seriously though, who the fuck came up with the idea that you should use two different triggers for the gas pedal? The more I think about it the more I want that analog keyboard so bad, the good one from that company that's always has them sold out cuz I'll be damned if I give razor any of my money, and all the other ones are a waste of optical, just having shorter key presses or customizable key presses rather than actual analog control which is like the whole fucking point! It's the only improvement that we've had on keyboard since going way back in the day when keyboard used to give you extra keys before they figured out like you could be less keys for more money.. I still have my g15 I will always have my g15 and I have another g15 I found it a Goodwill that works just fine, and a mother fuckin Trace pencil to fix it whenever it fucks up.
That's pretty killer. Props given where props are earned. This is just one of those showcases that the best tech isn't always the tech that ended up a success. This beats the balls off of any ball mouse. If they marketed these better they could have made pretty good bank. I mean I went to school in the late 90's and I recall having to constantly open up mice and clean them. Having these things in a school or library setting where you don't want random people opening up your mice would have been amazing.
Yeah! The lack of removable ball is an angle I didn't consider as far as resistance to vandalism etc
My high school was such a setting. If you want to stop kids stealing the balls, you either lock them up between uses, glue them in, or use ball-less mice. All three methods got used. Locking up when all we had was macs for specific classes. Gluing in for the first few months after getting a bunch of Win95 machines, then ball-less mice after that.
This is the first time I’ve watched some of your videos, went to your Chanel to find another and realised I’ve been watching your shorts for ages
I used to use these in a school computer lab in the early 2000's, and i remember them having the tracking problem. They collected dirt, making the tracking problem worse, but since the dirt was on the outside, it was easier to clean, like you demonstrated.
You missed a great chance to try an optical mouse on that surface. At least some optical mice wouldn't work there either. Recently encountered a Apple mouse spec'd in a situation with a white laminate counter, did not work at all.
I thought about that after the fact, but honestly what I decided to do was to post the video, wait for people to make suggestions about what else to test, and then I'll follow up with a short where I just quickly go through some other experiments
@@CathodeRayDude Yes! An optical mouse on glitter sounds like fun.
@@Kae6502 It will work fine, albeit perhaps with some stuttering, but mostly should be fine. Don't predict a problem. Not really an entertaining demo imo.
Just wanted to say, your channel is awesome! I love the content and you present it very well!
First time seeing your channel, but this is awesome! Happily subscribed. Great work.
Your channel deserves to blow up in popularity. Incredibly well covered and interesting topics every time
Honestly great formal content keep it up glad I found your channel.
Instantly one of my favorite CZcamsrs love this your awesome....also hilarious these videos are therapeutic
This is really nice and I was so glad to start supporting you on Patreon :)
Hello new patreon friend, it's good isn't it? I signed up super recently myself
I used mine, the Honeywell version, till it just disintegrated....over 20 years...it was...is...the best mouse I ever had. If I could get one new with a spinner in the middle I would buy it today.
The angular anomalies you observed don't make any difference. After a day or so I was compensating for them without thinking. No matter where you were it worked. On a wall or any desk it just worked. No mouse pad needed. I used it on a CAD system called Tango for PCB design. The screen would automatically advance the page when you moused into the border of the screen and the mouse could go a far as the cord would allow.
Excellent video! Keep up the good work.
First vid I ever seen of this channel. NICE. thanks
I can heartily recommend watching that Mother Of All Demos. It's from 1968 and it features: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. 🤯
ohwow, oh wow, dude, this video is the ACE!! you nailed it down to the teeth. awesome and educative, enjoyed it a lot! thanks bro!
Jesus that was a rollercoaster.
You earned my sub. This is entertaining as fudge. I laughed more than I should. Thank you for that!
In the late 80's me and my friend sold a product called Mouse Wash, a cleaning ball to clean the rollers on ball mice. The ball was acrylic but had a micro textured surface and would grab the gunk on the rollers and it would stick to the acrylic ball, once cleaned you put the original ball back in and you were good to go and the acrylic ball could be cleaned with soap and water.
I would have loved to have that back in the day!
This was an ingenious way to solve the dirt issues. If it had been advertised better when it was introduced it probably would have become the industry standard for a while
Thanks for sharing, very cool and informative video!
Potentiometers don't need to have limits on them, and in-fact many don't. There are also potentiometers that can read more than 360 degrees, like 720 degrees or 900 degrees, and so on.
I don't know this for a fact, but I would strongly expect the pots used on the original mouse didn't have limits on them, and simply wrapped around when they reached the end of their sweep.
Another possibility is that the limits of the potentiometers just matched up with the limits of the screen. It's not like they had Doom in those days with its 360 degree rotation. When the mouse cursor hit the edge of the screen, there was no reason it ever needed to go further. It's also easier from the perspective of the programmer to have the hardware give absolute coordinates rather than messing around with deltas and wrapping.
It wouldn't have even needed any sort of gearing reduction. With 1 inch diameter wheels and a 720 degree potentiometer, you'd get about 6 inches of movement from left to right or top to bottom, which is in line with the area we use on modern mousepads (remembering that we like to keep the mouse squarely on the pad when we use it and not hanging over the edges, so the area the center of the mouse traverses is only a fraction of the pad).
This isn't to say that they couldn't have used potentiometers without limiters, of course, just that it wouldn't be necessary.
I like the infomerical level of tests. Certainly sold me on how it works even now
Always stoked to see Doug Engelbart content.
This would still be great for heavy industry applications and extreme environments
If underwater welders ever need to close the support ticket on the spot, this mouse could be adapted and used submerged
Wow... AWESOME video! 🔥🔥 Really enjoyed it!