Who's responsible for the optical mouse? (it's not Xerox)
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- čas přidán 22. 01. 2023
- I just keep making videos about mice.
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There are videos and PDF transcripts of all these interviews (seriously, CHM has it together), both linked below.
Blalock:
www.computerhistory.org/colle...
• Orall History of Travi...
Gordon:
www.computerhistory.org/colle...
• Oral History of Gary G...
Holland:
www.computerhistory.org/colle...
• Oral History of Bill H...
Lyon:
www.computerhistory.org/colle...
• Oral History of Richar... - Věda a technologie
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yelling and swearing and throwing things? ive never been more excited for a CRD video
Not enough throwing imo. Otherwise on point
@@ThickpropheT Indeed, a good optical mouse conspiracy story definitely needs more throwing..
I think he swore once. Once. And tossed one mouse. Kinda lame after the hype at the beginning. Great video tho.
the split lip makes it
MouseJet probably comes from the rest of HP's naming of things… like LaserJet, DeskJet, ScanJet, JetDirect, etc.
You're such a natural at talking to an audience you can't see. It doesn't sound or feel like you're reading a script like even the top tier tubers do. Don't ever stop, not until you're rich, or tired of making videos. Subbed.
Don't stop when you're rich. We need this type of content. So much of the retro CZcams is stuffy and boring. Gravis is feisty and it makes it super fun.
I've binge watched this entire channel and I haven't ever seen someone perfectly encapsulate why I enjoy watching these videos so much. It's more than just the rhythm or cadence by which each product or idea is presented, but rather the CRD's complete approach to making videos.
handheld scanning was eventually solved... by very high resolution cameras in modern cell phones and image processing algorithms to remove the inevitable distortion. i use it somewhat regularly to scan forms and such. nothing like the speed and reliability of a fujitsu scansnap but great for eg capturing paper receipts for expense reports while on business travel
Nice Amogus Amiga shirt. The optical mouse was a huge deal. I'm a retro grouch when it comes to a lot of old crap, computers, cars, etc...but there are two things in that realm that are truly just unacceptable that they didn't come out sooner: intermittent windshield wipers, and optical mice.
EDIT: I mean optical mice FOR THE MASSES. Just like the entire video was talking about.
They actually did... before "optical" mice, there were several brands of laser mice, going back many years earlier. I used them in college regularly on our Sun workstations - the mouse pad was a flat piece of metal with a grid silk-screened on it and the mouse had a very obvious red laser LED coming from the bottom (when you lifted it up).
Until the current form of optical mouse came out, many of us assumed (for a number of years at least) that we'd be shifting to lasers instead of balls at some point.
Haha I had the idea to do such a thing. I even posted an image on imgur of it where I changed the logo on an Amiga, and made the commodore logo sus. Nobody noticed and thought i Just posted a non sequitur image of an Amiga. :D
Idk when intermittent windshield wipers came out, but they need to go to a finer continuous digi-anagolus operation. They are either way too slow, or way too damn fast!
No it wasn't. The roller ball mouse was a big deal. The optical not so much. Just an evolution…
@@BloodAsp it's actually an interesting story that somebody should do a video on, if they haven't already. They were invented in the late '60s by Robert Kearns, presented to the big three american automakers, and then in 1969 Ford introduced them as a high-end option with absolutely no credit or payment given. Chrysler introduced them without permission in the late '70s as well. Robert started lawsuits against both companies for stealing his work. They didn't really become common, or at least expected, until sometime in the '80s on the average car. I have cars from the late '80s that still only have 2-speed wipers.
I was a daily user of a Sun Microsystems optical mouse (Xerox-style) with the metal mouse pad. I always wondered why it took so many years for the mouse on my PC to go optical. This all makes so much more sense to me now.
Yea that always puzzled me too. Those Sun mice were much better than ball mice, but they did attract their own kind of scummy dirt! What I miss most about them was the common use of the middle button. Nobody uses that much anymore.
@@st3v3sm1th still used on linux desktiops, I guess you're right.
@@st3v3sm1thSide buttons and the scroll middle click replaced it.
I love that we've now had enough videos about mice to make a pretty extensive playlist. I love these deep dives into topics that seem trivial and unimportant to most people, because I enjoy collecting somewhat unusual bits of trivia.
I think you did a great job pointing out the distinction between "who first" versus "who practical", especially when it involves swerving the technology. Same with TV, Brits (and Scots especially) will scream Baird invented TV, sure he invented _a_ TV but not _the_ TV, and that sells Baird short.
I suppose I must begrudgingly agree, since it took him a while to even be convinced that mechanical wasn’t the future. He was very skeptical of electronic TV at first
When I was studying I.T. at college the system support guy (who was notoriously highly strung & wore wooden clogs) decided to glue the ball retaining ring thing on every mouse because he was annoyed that students would constantly remove the balls and scrape the rollers.
Barely a week passed before the first 12" CRT went through a window.
Take the anger out on the mouse and find the guy with the glue! Then a window. It probobly is more rewarding throwing the problem out of the windows instead of the CRT :)
My school glued them shut too, it was an attempt to stop the occasional ball from being stolen but it cost them more when they all stopped working 😂
Had the same happen back in university in the late 90s. The lab admins would GLUE the ball ring so no one would open it to try and clean it. Supposedly they would *someday* disassemble each one and clean it. Guess they always went to the trash bin first...
@@Wormetti Public schools had to glue them shut for safety. Those mouse balls were rubber coated metal and fscking *hurt* when you got beaned in the back of the head by a stolen one.
When my school started gluing the rings shut, I started carrying a phillips screwdriver.
I really enjoy how you get down to brass tacks and avoid pedantry while still understanding pedantry. It's an incredible skill and I love it.
Awesome! I had a first gen optical mouse and did struggle with it in games, but I still loved it simply because I didn’t have to clean it. I didn’t struggle with ball mice like you though. I found that using a textured mouse pad and simply cleaning the pad periodically cut down on accumulation of junk inside the ball mouse meaning it was not often I had to clean my mouse rollers.
And I agree about the old Xerox design. It was terrible and doesn’t seem related. I had one of these mice and it stunk. Not only did you need to use the small grid mouse pad, but if the mouse became rotated slightly on the pad it would stop working. It had two sensors, one handling X movement and the other Y … and since it had felt pads on the underside, it didn’t even slide that nicely over the metal reflective pad versus a ball mouse with Teflon pads on the underside. I quickly abandoned it and went back to a ball mouse. There was definitely a novelty to it being optical but the trade offs were not worth it versus the occasional cleaning a ball mouse required.
I think that the entire involvement of the Xerox mouse is that they might have used the "optical flow" algorithm... but I suspect that they actually _didn't._ I suspect that they instead just used a hardwired mix of eprom (for the result), register (for some memory, so that direction could be detected), and a smidge of control logic. An entire axis (baring the sensors) could probably be implemented in a PAL or GAL.
One of my earliest memories with any semblance of "fixing" something, was our Microsoft mouse on our Packard Bell 486 not working smoothly, and me taking it apart and noticing all the gunk on the rollers, scraping it off and putting it back together. It was yeeeears before I realized actually cleaning the ball itself helped too.
I preferred ball mice for a few years just because I got very used to the inertia of the ball. But I also only used a mouse for playing FPS games and for moving my mouse cursor between windows (since I was a focus-follows-mouse diehard for ages, and preferred to use the keyboard for all actual interaction). I also found cleaning the balls and rollers to be weirdly cathartic and satisfying.
@@absalomdraconis I think the kind that uses the glass pad with the grid drawn on it does not use optical flow. It uses the same kind of encoder as the ball mouse: a wheel inside the mouse turns based on one axis of motion, and lines drawn around the wheel are optically tracked. It might seem like it just counts the lines as they go by, but it's a little more complex than that because it can tell which direction it is turning in.
The ones with the paper tracking pattern is similar to modern mice. And if I recall correctly, on this channel a similar mouse was demonstrated that knew its absolute position on the page since the pattern was aperiodic. But even that used shifting of the dots for short-term movement tracking.
@@absalomdraconis yeah that makes a lot of sense. It would explain why it was so terrible if things were off axis. So perhaps we could say Xerox technically invented the optical mouse but HP made a sensor (with no help from Xerox) that resulted in a good mouse.
Now I'm too scared to look up where Logitech's "Invisible Eye" sensor came from, which in my option was the "Optical Mouse v2" but I'm guessing also came from a random lab full of guys just tossing around ideas of 50 year old physics
I loved this video. It's similar to one I saw a week or so ago from Defunctland about the Disney Channel identification theme and who composed it...They did a deep dive into copyrights, and interviewed loads of people who had worked with Disney, or the companies that worked with Disney, around the time the theme premiered. They finally got the composer his due and ended up playing his music throughout the video. It was brilliantly done. Your video, while a different tone, showed the same frustration and need to get to the bottom of things and accurately explain the real history of optical mouse, essentially giving the inventors their due recognition. Well done!
I've been meaning to watch that, but haven't got around to it. But that reminds me of another great unnecessarily deep of a dive "origin-of-a-sound" video where hbomberguy tries to uncover the truth behind the Minecraft "oof". Also its tone of "fuck that guy who's trying to take credit for it" is kinda similar to "fuck xerox" here.
The Disney Channel is one of my favorite videos on CZcams. The effort and dedication into making that video and figuring out who made the jingle is top notch CZcams in my opinion.
@@odkres ... reagrding the Roblox 'Oof' that video from hbomberguy is a cracker! Have to watch the Defunctland video.
You are such a good storyteller, there is so much passion here. I don't really care if all the tiny details are perfect in this one, getting the story across mattered more.
By "all the tiny details are perfect" you really mean by 1998 the optical Mouse was available but a little more expensive ( not as stated in video that it didnt exist).
I don't know how common it was, but back when I was in school and we'd use a hand scanner (since that was the only one the school could afford), there was a piece of thin aluminium plate with a slightly sticky surface on one side that we'd put under the documents or book page we'd want to scan.
Worked pretty well, or at least it made scanning possible, if not convenient or easy.
I really appreciate the disclaimer at the beginning. Some days, I just can't handle that energy. Thankfully today is not one of those days :)
This is probably my new favorite video of yours. It feels like you're at the top of your game presentation-wise here. You so concisely fit so much into nearly 30 minutes and delivered it so smoothly that it felt like only 10 minutes. You had me hooked in, start to finish. Always a treat watching your stuff.
My experience with ball mice was not so bad. I recall opening it up to clean on rare occasion, but was not constantly bothered by it clogging up like some people here.
Yeah, I cleaned mine like once a month and that was because I was obsessive. It feels like most people lived in a completely different world from me.
I have a Mouse Systems optical mouse, which came from a CAD workstation in a college, where they had a room full of PCs equipped with them in the early '90s. I'm sure they were a niche product, but they certainly weren't unheard of in the '80s and '90s. I did see them, and their matching mouse pad with a grid pattern on it, at computer shows and in magazines at the time. I think they were about as common as the Microsoft InPort bus mouse -- most computer users never owned one, but knew they existed.
p.s. I'm using a ball mouse right now, and I only have to clean it maybe once every 2 or 3 years. I think they got a bad reputation because when they were popular, a lot more people used to smoke, and even did so at their desk while using their computer. Even today, if you look at the mouse and mouse pad of a smoker, it is filthy and discolored. So it's no wonder that caused problems with ball mice.
I have a cat and a dog, both shed enough to turn my house into a fur coat factory. I got an old ball mouse for my retro rig and I can't use it for more than 2 minutes after cleaning it before it starts tracking like shit. When I got it, I felt nostalgic. That quickly faded and now it sits in storage.
You're right about them being revolutionary though! I was absolutely fascinated by optical mice by the time we started getting them back in the day. What an amazing thing
A video about trackballs would be neat, esentially giant upside down ball mice but theyve got funky bearings and sensors now.
Also, optical trackballs worked well before optical mice did. Logitech had a whole range with red balls with black dots on them to be tracked by the optical sensor. An optical sensor needing a specific pattern to track is no big deal on a trackball. You want to use a mouse on a bunch of different surfaces, but nobody has any particular desire to change out the ball in their trackball.
@@cbecht That sounds awesome. Even mechanical trackballs were better than ball mice when it came to picking up crap. You didn't need to clean the rollers in them anywhere near as often as a ball mouse.
Trackballs were developed for military radar systems in the 1940's btw. It you want a good quality trackball now look at arcade control panel suppliers they have the good stuff. I've had this crazy plan in the back of my mind for a few years about cutting holes in my computer desk and replacing my mouse with a full size trackball and a couple high quality arcade buttons mounted directly in the desk like an arcade machine control panel. They have USB adapters for arcade trackball mechanisms that connect them to a PC as a mouse for use in MAME cabinets.
@@atomicskull6405 I got a used Atari home game console trackball and replaced the sensors and circuitry with that from a Genius GM6 ball mouse, it worked really well.
I was admittedly a bit late switching to optical mice; I was pretty diligent about keeping my wheels and surfaces clean so I usually had pretty good tracking with my ball mice, and at the time I was using some of Logitech's early wireless models and the first optical sensors were power-hungry enough that you got much better battery life out of the ball versions.
Another fringe benefit is that ball mice will move/shift the cursor in a predictable way if you lift the mouse, and the cursor will shift back in nearly the same way when placing the mouse back down. When moving quickly (especially in gaming), this can be significant in terms of how it shifts your point of aim, and when you're used to a particular ball mouse you can more easily keep the cursor where you expect it across mouse lifts.
Optical mice by comparison (especially early ones) produce pretty wild and unpredictable jitter when lifting the mouse, so every time you pick up the mouse it's a random walk by the time you place it back down, putting your cursor somewhere you don't expect. This all mattered quite a bit more in the early days when most mice were 400dpi, but these days the sensors are high enough DPI that you don't need to lift the mouse as often and modern sensors tend to stop and start tracking with much less jitter as you lift the mouse anyway.
That's a great point, gaming is a huge aspect in mice and keyboard history
I remember my first experiences with optical mice as a twelve year old. They felt light and flimsy, and were very fussy about surface quality. There's not much you can do about a fraying, peeling mousepad with torn edges, but the old ball mouse can be carefully cleaned.
I definitely enjoyed this, even though I tend to disagree about the importance of first concept provers even though they wouldn’t be known without the later mass production devisers.
The opinion piece tone was nice for a shorter subject piece as well, as much as I enjoy your more-factual ones. Citing the interviews still was a nice touch as well
The motion control TV remote mouse concept is one which persists today in the form of $8 stuff from AliExpress - I own a couple, in fact. Bought them mainly for having a remote to control volume and pause media on my Windows PC from the couch, but the mouse isn't all that bad. They incur a surprising amount of wrist pain and can be frankly miserable to use for more than a few seconds, but if you need a mouse quickly they serve their purpose. I've found myself tossing one in my pocket to go to the server room a few times - the ones I have have a full QWERTY keyboard on the back. Neither necessary nor practical, but slightly interesting.
The original Xerox style optical mouse was really popular with graphic designers, I have a novelty t shirt somewhere with a mouse and pad saying "from my cold dead hands"
Logitech's Trackman Marble trackball uses a similar optical setup, but tracking the dotted surface of the ball. It first came out in 1995, so the potential WAS there even earlier. I'm surprised it took another 4-5 years for companies to apply the concept to simply tracking the surface that the mouse is on.
I’ve always appreciated your passion for the video topics you take on. This kind of indignation and from-the-heart presentation is another facet I wasn’t expecting! A surprise, but a welcome one.
It honestly made me stop and ponder the mice I’ve used over the years, and why using a ball mouse recently just felt so awkward…
I love all the effort you put into your content, great work!
He needs to put that effort into his health
@@Chris-rg6nm I disagree with you. His effort has been apportioned appropriately.
This is probably one of my favorite videos you've made. History is written by the victors, not the pretend ones on a technicality. I think you did justice to the real inventors of the optical mouse.
I bought an Intellieye back in 99 and absolutely loved it. I used it for over 20 years until the switch for the left click finally failed.
My first was a Logitech MouseMan Optical USB. First-gen USB, first-gen optical, first-gen scroll-wheel. Compared to any mouse now, it's awful. Low resolution, relatively picky about surfaces ... Compared to the ball mice before it? It was an honest-to-gosh _revolutionary_ device. I knew it then, it's not just nostalgia goggles. It was a game changer. Having gone back and used my old old old OLD MouseMan Cordless (PS/2, no wheel, 3-button, radio with about six inches of usable range on a good day), the mouse ball was absolutely a travesty inflicted on mankind.
Can you replace and resolder the switch, or is the footprint or switch feel different from the ones available today? Personally I'd take the switch apart just to see how it looks inside and how it failed.
@@nyanpasu64 nah, it's long gone
Mine failed like that too... :(
I had a blue early 2000s intellimouse that worked perfectly for 15 years until the cable started to flake out. Loved it. PS/2 compatible as well which was awesome for retro machines! I'll fix it eventually... but time... you know...
Your presentation of the subject, whatever the subject is so engaging, why some network has not snapped you up is perplexing! Thank you.
Interesting video - I remember first using an optical mouse - it was in 1991 and on a Sun workstation. It needed a special mouse mat made from a fine metal mesh that it 'look' at to work out how it was moving. Spent the next 10+ years working with PCs and cleaning the crap out of ball mice. Always wondered what the missing link (or not, in this case) between Sun's mice and the Intellimouse (the first PC optical mouse I saw) was. Now I know - thanks!
You! Swearing? Never!
In all seriousness, I welcome these kinds of opinion videos. Every video maker needs to make videos that purely exist to vent sometimes.
So crazy how fast your channel has grown, and deservedly so!
I owned a Mouse Systems optical mouse for my PCjr. I remember it included PC Paintbrush for around $99 back in 86. It was very affordable.
I LOVE how passionate you were about this invention! Keep them coming like this! I might even go as far as to say this might be your best video to date. Great job sir! Great job indeed.
The infomercial bit stunned me. Never stop making high-effort meme bits even in the ranty videos.
In 1999 I think, in collage, I bought a $300 ish handheld scanner which was the size of a delayed release insulin pen. It had a few LCD lines which would show you the text it scanned. It only scanned text BTW. It saved me countless library book rentals as I could scan in the library. It had a image to text option too. You could then delete the image and free up a lot of space.
I found one of these types of devices in a box of random IT gear in the office i worked in around 2000. Used it a little bit, then gave up on it when i realised i could type faster than i could scan with the thing. Chucked it back in the box.
I've rewatched this video a couple of times now, and it's still as good as the first view! Your ability to relay this story of mice to your camera in a very engaging manner is unparalleled. Keep up the grand work, comrade.
15:53 "I have seen image tracking in the Navy". I love how the whole Palo Alto "scene" is basically all spooks, informants and military. who got young bill bates his first government contract? what was young Chomsky up to researching the ur-language at mit (for military use voice input systems)? etc etc
I love your content and how passionate about it you are- also you are such a huggable looking human bean.
I like your calm essays but I also love it when we see your passion
these videos bring me up. Love your passion and your great articulation of ideas. Another banger
This is my favorite Cathode Ray Dude video to date. It was honestly refreshing to hear your opinion on this topic that i'd never thought about before. Good on you.
Great video Gravis. Love your work and nice to hear some opinions!
This has to be one of your best videos so far!
I'm surprised this isn't one of your most viewed videos, love the passion behind it, the history, the craziness that we could have had optical mice earlier! Thanks for mentioning this video bombed, in one of your latest ones, would have never searched it out otherwise. :D
Don't give up. I fell asleep to this and it was so nice. Will wait for next vid !
I remember the first time I used an optical mouse. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The thing fucking GLIDED though the table. Smooth movement, you never had to clean it, and also the red light coming from below looked cool as hell. It blows my mind companies quietly got them into market, like they were ashamed of what they were selling.
I really like your thoughts on things, so thanks for sharing them!
oh my god my flatbed is the size of a stereo receiver i didn't know they got that small. If only they made tabloid-size ones
I remember those HP laser printers with IrDA, at the time I had a Nokia 6210i with IrDA and tried to send a contact (business card) to the printer. It actually printed the name and number and then locked up and no one else on the network could print to it until it was power cycled.
Your presentation to camera on this video is stellar, well done!
Im all about this energy, love it. Also super interesting because i always credited Xerox with the optical mouse and its really interesting to see that the sensor that actually got us to the optical mouse came out of a scanner from HP.
i love your passion. keep up the fantastic work my dude.
I really like this style of video from you!
It is nuts how even my zoomer ass has years of experience with the dreaded ball mice, they were everywhere well into the 2000s. Really overstayed their welcome
18:15 is such a wild shot. That level of extra is exactly what I've come to expect. Gorgeous video as always.
This might be the best video you’ve created. I ❤ this!!!!!
The first PC my parents bought in 1989 had a Mouse Systems optical mouse, so I must find myself very lucky then. I still have it to this day because I always thought it was so neat. I wonder how my dad was convinced to buy the mouse when purchasing the PC. I'm sure at that time the cost was far less than the $300ish price point quoted in the video because he never would have paid that much, knowing him...
I remember when the MS was bringing out the first Intellimouse and being blown away by the "infra-red" technology. I'd go through ball mice almost yearly. When I got the Intellimouse Optical (the one with side buttons) I used that until the left mouse button lost its plastic texture and switch under it started to fail. I have in the meantime picked up one of the original Intellimouses as well as a small number of other early optical mice like the Apple Pro mouse.
However I still use the original ball mice on my Amiga and Atari ST.
Great job man! Throw this format in the mix sometimes.
Sir, I absolutely love pretty much all of your videos. I love the stuff you cover basically all of it, and I enjoy your style and presentation and watching you improve (your words I believe lol) ..... I wish I could support you more, but I hope some good words and appreciation will suffice for the time being.... You really have become one of my favorites to see a new video from, doesn't really matter to read what it's over, I'll be amused, entertained and oh my, maybe learn a few things along the way.... Throw in some good tunes and I'd call it a good day 🙃 keep up the good work and be safe!!
GREAT video CRD :)
Best from London
Few minutes in and I already much prefer this more ranty style over your regular essays. More I say, more!
for me exactly the opposite and that's why this is the first video of this channel that i didn't watch till the end
Very enlightening. I am still getting the creeps remembering how much of a chore it's been getting rid of that filth that built up inside of a mechanical mouse, and it was usually always necessary to do that in the midst of a gaming session at a LAN party which sucked AF
That mouse ball extraction and throw into the other hand was flawless and a priceless demo of having it done hundreds of times!
I had a Palm III, I still have it. I adored it for taking notes in classes.
I watched this great video yesterday. Today, while somehow falling down the rabbit hole of sewing machines, I discovered that some modern sewing machines use modified versions of these optical mouse sensors to detect fabric movement, so that they can adjust the stitch automatically. (Apparently useful in things like quilting, where the fabric is moved by hand rather than by the ordinary feed mechanism.) I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also used to detect asymmetrical movement in thick fabrics or stacks of fabrics, to detect when the top isn’t moving at the same speed as the bottom, causing unwanted bunching or whatever. Modern high end machines supposedly can adjust automatically, maybe this is part of how they do it.
One sensor is in the base of the machine, looking at the underside of the fabric, the other built into the presser foot, looking at the top. (Older-style machines, like my mom’s Husqvarna, use a rotary encoder on the presser foot, to measure distance to allow automatic repeat button holes, for example. I bet those use optical encoders just like in old ball mice.)
There is a pleasing full-circle in the details there. The HP guys seemed to allude to their "air mouse" idea tracking the user's room *visually*. That has come to fruition in the VR market as "inside-out tracking".
They also talk about the computer and TV converging (or not converging) which we're only seeing this decade - web applications, music and video streaming, hell I can cast my PC to my TV.
Yes! Was just watching your other videos . Saw the thumbnail and was like huh I didn’t see that before…then I see “uploaded 5 minutes ago” , damn!
That is a picture of a variant of HP 2200 Laserjet that is still in my home printing two-sided sheets, its solenoid pads replaced, cracked plastic glued and rotating mirror lubricated with the oil for the electric hair cutter. HP 2100 is even more resilient beast but without USB port. BTW, although it says "HP", it is a throughbred Canon inside.
Love this format, more rants please
Travis Blalock was a professor at the University of Virginia after HP. If you were a student there around 2000, you might have heard him give presentations about what went into the design of this chip. I remember he gave this presentation to our Intro to Engineering class. To do the amount of error correlation calculations that the scanning chip did on the size and amount of samples needed to make it work, required an extraordinary number of flops; nothing that a CPU at the time could have done. It needed to be an ASIC. To get the die size managably small enough and the power low enough, there were custom logic gates in each processing cell. Cutting edge stuff at the time. A super-computer's worth of processing power condensed into a commodity mouse and the only news about it existed in some college slides.
This is more fascinating than I thought. Thanks.
Using a ball mouse is like trying to control a 1950's pickup truck with loose steering.
Damn this was a great video, you’re awesome!
I was 4 years old in 1999, I remember using an Intellimouse Explorer on my grandma's computer in the very early 2000s, and still using the cheap ball mouse that came with the other computers I was using, I didn't realize optical mice as we know them were really that new.
My LG TV has a remote that acts as a gyro mouse. I love that interface. So much more intuitive and faster than those menu based systems. This actually was a major reason for the choice of TV brand for me.
I didn’t know about this til I already bought the TV. Day one, I thought it was stupid. Now I’m not sure I could ever live without it.
I've got a dedicated device. It was called an "air mouse" when I bought it. In the box was the device itself, a USB dongle, and a micro-USB charging cable. I use it with an HTPC I built out of old hardware. As far as the computer's concerned, it's just a regular old USB keyboard and mouse. No drivers required. Need to type something? Just flip it over and use the keyboard on the other side. It automatically stops sending motion changes while the keyboard side is facing up. The buttons are small and it's missing a few keys (most notably Escape), but it's perfectly adequate for plugging the name of a show into a browser's search box, and using it with a seek bar is far superior to using fast-forward and rewind on a more conventional video playback device. Actually, since using graphical playback programs on a computer with a seek bar in my teens, I've grown to hate the rewind/fast-forward paradigm that still persists on most dedicated devices. It's a necessity of the medium for tape, but there's no excuse for sticking with it for dis(c|k)s, and especially not flash memory.
Great opinion piece. I'm right there with you, I think the implementation of an idea that actually gets used is the note worthy one. Kind o reminds me of something I read I think from stranger in a strange land. Once you fully understand an idea, it becomes yours.
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Excellent video! Thanks!
My first optical mouse was for my Amiga back in 1993. It was one of types that came with a specialized mouse pad. It worked pretty well. Alpha Data brand that came out in 1992! Around $60 or $80 if I recall. Should work with Atari’s too. Golden Image also made a 3-Button optical for Amiga and Atari with a switch. For around the same price.
Your video is mostly correct. Both the above mice were commonly
Available in smaller computer stores. It was a premium item but not “100s of dollars” although yes I guess they would be if you apply inflation. The famous MS mouse based on the HP design is SECOND GEN or a MKII of the optical mouse era. It’s kind of like how a lot of people think Street Fighter II is just “the first real Street Fighter.” Since the first was so bad. Heh. No, it’s the second. Even though as second it’s the one that actually succeeded. Much like your comparison to Henry Ford.
If I understand correctly, first trully mass produced affordable car were Oldsmobile 's Runabouts, but they were more countryside oriented - and excellent on that.
@@paveloleynikov4715 lol!
First Generation Optical Mouse.
czcams.com/video/0dMVfEoufd8/video.html
@@HoldandModify we could argue if generation concept if really applicable to technological tree's stubs:) also, i won't be sure if it isn't the case of "all know how optical mouse should work and t isn't that convenient". But that Alpha mouse looks like proper affordable execution of that concept🙂
@@paveloleynikov4715 it a good mouse! In the old days.
Xerox should always be a cautionary tale imo. They had the future in the palms of their hands, they had it all. And their lack of ambition and awareness of just what they had in their R&D labs and obsessive focus on JUST printing things and nothing else is what sealed their doom. Both Microsoft and Apple instantly recognized the gold mine they saw when they visited it and plundered as much of it as possible right under the noses of Xerox being none the wiser. Such an absolute shame of wasted potential and failure to seize ANY opportunity on Xerox's part. They had everything almost handed to them and they wasted all of it.
Modern businesses have solved this problem by eliminating R&D labs
My most hated part of ball mice is that at school the balls would frequently get stolen. The schools solution was to glue the cover on, so they NEVER got cleaned from that point on.
This is exactly the energy I needed today.
Back in the 90s, I worked with some Sun Workstations that had those awful optical mice. Not only did you have to use the special surface for the mouse, if you held the mouse at an angle on the pad, it wouldn't work anymore until you reoriented it to be straight up. The ball mice were an improvement over those early optical mice.
Well mechanical mouse comes from the 1960s, watch the mother of all demos to see it in action. It had the encoders on the surface, so it could get snagged on things. So ball mice fixed that, but picked up dirt as well. The Sun optical mouse was pretty bad, if the mousepad had any wear to the grid pattern, or if you didn't hold it just right. I seen a ball-less mechanical mouse, with magnetically loaded shaft sensors, which could track over irregular surfaces, and wouldn't get gunked up, but the third coming of optical mouse defeated it in the marketplace. Although it was better in many ways, but also pricier.
Love this!! Love your passion! 😉
The important thing about ball mice - they had to be replaced frequently. I'm sure they didn't want the optical mouse because it was so reliable. That is not a money maker.
I can't imagine what you were doing to mice if you needed to replace them frequently. Usually cleaning the exposed part of the roller is all you need to keep them going.
I don't miss ball mice. I had no idea the source for the mass market optical mouse but I hadn't bothered to look into it before watching your video which saved me the effort.
Interesting video. Loving it. Sad to hear how HP never really got their credit.
Wow, HP. I had no idea! Thanks for shedding light on this.
Woah woah woah. Spoiler warning ⚠️
Working at Best Buy at the time, HP really was doing some awesome things. Loved their desktop systems We sold and I really felt HP would be remembered for some great things. I dumbly just assumed Microsoft designed the optical mouse for the longest time until this video
@@JaredConnell Same folks who make HP sauce, right?
"warning this one is a rant you might want to skip it" *grabs popcorn and straps in*
I love the authenticity of this channel
Really enjoyed this
8 minutes into the video and I'm already on the edge of my seat. Good stuff.
Edit: I MUST know where can I find one of those Amiga/Amogus shirts. Please.
Sun also had a optical/laser mouse. It needed special mousepad though. Shiny reflective metal with printed black grid, and once it wore out you had to replace it, or it worked really janky. If you printed a grid on paper it would also sort of worked. So between the Xerox mouse, and this one, there was Sun. Cheaper than Xerox, but still workstation pricing. Used it in college computer lab back in the day. So the MS mouse was probably at keast third optical mouse to come along.
I really love the point you make about the most important time to regard an invention as "being invented" was when it changed the market for regular joes.
Epic rant. I remember when everything switched over and with such little fanfair. Think the reason nobody really gave it much thought because the MP3 came out at the same time as well as other important tech like USB. Everything was changing so fast we never got a chance to realize how important the upgrade really was.
Your rant about Xerox not doing anything with the superior optical mouse they had and forcing us to endure ball mice for decades reminds me of how I feel about the rewind/fast-forward paradigm for audio and video playback.
The rewind and fast-forward paradigm was a necessity of the medium with tape. With dis(c|k)-based storage, you get random access (and flash memory takes it to the extreme by lacking seek times). Want to listen to the last track on the side of an LP? Just put down the needle at the start of the track. A good CD player might let you type in the track number to play, and even a crappy one will at least let you step through the track numbers by repeatedly pressing "Next track". DVDs and Blue-rays have menus and chapters, and of course, most file systems assume random access as a given.
And yet, with the exception of the record player, those dedicated audio and video playback devices force the use of the rewind/fast-forward paradigm within a track/chapter/file. If you're lucky you might be able to type in a time index, which while usually clunky, is still a better UI than rewind/fast-forward. Hell, being able to jump forward or backwards a few seconds is a better UI than rewind/fast-forward, and few devices provide even that.
What makes for a good UI for audio and video playback is something computer playback programs have offered for decades: the seek bar. Click on the bar and it jumps to that time index. Gone too far or not far enough? Just click to the appropriate side of where it is now. It makes jumping around quick and easy. Especially when paired with keyboard shortcuts for jumping a few seconds forwards or backwards. And yet, it's only available on computers and computer-like devices such as smartphones. Dedicated devices just don't offer it. It's like everyone who designs them still thinks they're working with VHS or compact cassette.
It's infuriating. We can do better. We DO do better. Except when it comes to dedicated devices. Then we suddenly get amnesia for the existence of anything other than tape.