20 Years Ago, Microsoft introduced its optical mouse | Hacker News Reader

20 Years Ago, Microsoft introduced its optical mouse

gizmodo.com

188 pointsturtlegrids174 comments

I've been using the same Microsoft Optical USB mouse at work since 2008. It's so heavily used that the textured plastic has been polished completely smooth where my hand touches it. It's great and I hope it never fails.

Also...

>and a desktop workstation that while powerful at the time, would be laughable today (16MB of RAM baby!).

16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well. The fairly basic family Dell we got in 1998 came with 32MB. The budget gaming PC I built in 2000 had 128MB. A powerful workstation in 1999 would have had 256MB.

Yeah I raised an eyebrow at that as well.

IIRC in 1999-2000 I had a Geforce 256, 128Mb of RAM and an overclocked Duron.

> an overclocked Duron

Hah, did you also pencil in the traces on the CPU package to unlock the multiplier?

I had a Pentium II 333, and used the “tape over a pin” trick to change the multiplier from 66 to 100 and clock it at 400mhz!

Around that time (maybe a year later?) I had an ABIT BP6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) with 2x Celeron II's. They were 500MHz but trivially easy to overclock to 800MHz and above (I think I could get it to just about 900MHz but it became unstable at that point). To this day I still consider that to be one of the best PCs I've ever used - let along owned.

You could play Counterstrike AND burn a CD at the same time! I too look back with fondness at my BP6.

I had this same setup and it was just as awesome as you say.

Lovely that a simple device stood the test of time like that :) polished plastic is often great (except on thinkpad keyboards).

Also it's fun to see that 128MB to me still feels more impressive than 48GB

It's funny how one gets stuck on things like that. In between my family's 286 and our first Pentium, we didn't upgrade. Consequently, there's a part of me that still believes the 386, with its awesome Turbo button, to be unattainable high-end technology.

It is, it imprints the mystical wonder of your understanding at the time and the effects it has on you (first video game, first 16bit game, first 3d game, fps or rts) and it's there forever.

For me it’s my first experience with a 16 bit game console - the Sega Genesis (if I am not wrong). Played Final Fight at my friends place and I still cannot rate any gaming experience higher than that. I have since tried playing Final Fight again, but it’s not the same.

I spent so much time on this topic. And there are some 'firsts' that don't hold up to the magic they had. But some, even though they don't shine as much, still have surprising balance/depth/quality.

For instance, Resident Evil games, have a mood that is unparalleled (I'm exagerating a bit but you get the idea). It's blocky, slow, ridiculous technically for any next gen standards.. but the mood is so on point it makes the game worth it.

It’s similar for me and the Pentium III 600E with 128MB RDRAM and 10k cheetah drive + 21 inch CRT. Will never forget the day my boss dropped that bad boy on my desk. It was a HP Kayak and was such a leap in speed and capability (I was a multimedia producer at the time) that I still think in my minds eye that it’s the fastest machine I have ever used.

This kind of perception fixed in time is why eBay prices on vintage computers are so expensive. I feel it too, and own many vintage Macs because of it.

Turbo buttons weren't only a 386 thing. They existed way before. Even some XT clones had them.

My Compaq XT didn’t have the button, but there was a magic key combination that would change the colour of an LED on the front panel. AN LED THAT CHANGED COLOUR!!!

Ohhhh the turbo button. I remember that from our first 486DX2. The case had an oddly satisfying neon green segmented LCD display for CPU frequency that would drop from 50 to 25 if you disengaged the switch. Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me.

>> Why anyone would ever willingly do so is still beyond me

Some games had animations based on frames, not time between frames. So they where unplayable without reducing frequency

From my very vague memory, Reader Rabbit was one such game that was unplayable at a higher CPU frequency.

One day I switched off turbo while playing Test Drive 3.

Suddenly, I didn't need superhuman reflexes to play, and could drive on curves at speed :-D

I’ve been using the same intellimouse for work since about 2001 on a series of macs and Linux machines. It’s only now starting to be a bit flakey on the scroll wheel.

I’m kind of curious how long I can make it last and still be effective.

Buy a new one, and see how long it lasts by comparison.

https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/mice/mi...

Message us in 18 years.

You can buy any part of it on aliexpress. There is quite big community around that model.

The minimum requirements for Windows 98 (released June 1998) was 16MB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98#System_requirements

> 16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well

For sure - I got my first computer that year. It was a G3 iMac with 64 megs of ram. The salesperson assured me that a mac with 64 megs of ram was like a pc with 128, haha. I chose to believe him because I wanted to believe my purchase was worth it. I guess I was 13 back then, and that thing is still running today.

It wasn't a high-end purchase so I assume many computers had more ram than that at the time.

In fairness to the salesperson, they would've been right for typical internet usage. Late 90s and early 00s was the era of the internet toolbar; Windows users never left home without having at least 5 search bars and emoticon buttons!

And all the CPU-consuming adware and malware that came with them.

I'd gotten pretty good at disabling all the sneaky checkboxes, 'extra install options' and fucking bonzai buddies that seemed to be bundled with everything back then. I ended up having to reformat and reinstall everything once because of my carelessness. I was really careful not to install anything like that afterwards. They used to hide the 'extra bonus stuff' really well sometimes.

Even some legitimate things were bundled with some horrible spy and adware that make the ad ridden nightmare dystopia we have today seem quaint.

Apart from bonzi buddy being annoying, it didn't do anything that our modern browsers (chrome) and operating systems (windows, android) don't have baked in these days.

Which is why I can in all seriousness call google a spyware company.

Yeah. Bonsai Buddy didn't do much other than annoy. There were some pretty bad ones though. It was more tongue in cheek. The invisible mass data gathering, ad targetting and general invasiveness into every aspect of life is far more terrifying than some spyware feeding you the occasional popup.

> Bonsai Buddy didn't do much other than annoy

and eat up the limited amount of RAM on low-end machines, back when 32 MB of RAM as standard was still being sold in OEM builds.

Was Connectix RAM Doubler still around in '99? I remember it was very popular around the dorms a few years prior, when 16MB RAM was considered fairly robust.

I wish newer mouse has been as reliable. Even standard Microsoft USB Mouse failed me after a year or two, multiple times already.

On the other hand, my first mouse, a cheap OKER branded, lasted me 10 years before clicks start not registering.

Prices have gone down though. You can buy a Logitech mouse for €25 including shipping. For such a price replacing it every year isn't a big deal.

Even hiend mice fail at alarming rates currently, all due to OMRON being forced by their clients (microsoft/logitech/razer/steelseries/benq) to open factory in China. Price difference between Japanese made switch and Chinese was always maybe $.5 per switch. Today you dont even have choice of better quality.

> 16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well.

It wasn't state of the art but I was in high school and still earning free beer by raiding older machines and upgrading friends and families computers to 16MB of RAM. I know it was 1999 and onwards because installing napster was part of a typical job. Not the most affluent crowd though.

I don't remember the mechanical mice being bad. I cleaned them every few months, not every fifteen minutes, and the cursor dragged or jumped occasionally, not constantly. For me, the laser mouse was an incremental improvement rather than the game changer this article claims. Am I the only one?

No you're not. What fails the most frequently are the microswitches, anyway.

I wonder if wireless mouse using the ball would last much longer on battery. I guess, it could. It still uses a led light internally, but I don't think it needs to be that strong.

A wireless mouse could last indefinitely, if it used magnetic resolvers instead of encoders (and siphoned off a bit of the voltage to recharge the battery.

I expect you could also make a self-powered keyboard with a coil and magnet under the spacebar...

The problem is, if you use the rollers to harvest energy, they would have higher resistance to rotation, and thus would slip even easier...

The keyboard has to remain connected when you’re not using it.

Why?

I don't recall any of the mechanical mice I've taken apart having LEDs inside them. IIRC had 3 rollers/wheels which physically touched the ball and that was what "sensed" the motion. I'm talking 90s sort of era though, so it's possible more recent mechanical mice were designed differently.

Rollers were connected to wheel with a plenty of holes, and there was a led + fotodiode that was used to detect the motion of the wheel. At least that's what I thought back then. (> 20 years, heh)

I also remember just two rollers/wheels (X/Y).

For example, this page: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/mouse2.htm says something about "optical encoding disc".

Most basic 80s and 90s mice used LEDs to track the ball, via secondary wheels. They’re tiny and don’t look like lights so you probably overlooked them.

quadrature encoders use diodes

Completely agree. So often when I read articles similar to this one I can't help but think of that SNL skit with the iPhone reviewers complaining about rather esoteric issues, then being confronted by the Chinese factory workers who have to labor in much worse conditions: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o

The author significantly exaggerated how often ball mice needed cleaning. I was a heavy gamer at the time and had to clean my mouse once every week or two.

It was pretty bad at university computer labs. I was forever picking lint out of those mice and scraping gunk off the rollers.

Cleaning the ball was easy - cleaning the rollers inside often took scraping them off with a q-tip or something since the gunk would build up right where it tracked the mouse ball, a partial cleaning was worse than no cleaning at all since the mouse would skip.

I never had much luck with those velcro mouse cleaning kits, I'd still end up scraping the rollers.

For a long time when optical mice were first released they were garbage for any serious work for gaming. All the problems that mechanical mice had, optical mice also had - sometimes even worse. They were more fussy about the surfaces, lower resolution, even their lighter weight was less desirable for me as a gamer (at that time).

They were so mediocre that I had written them off as being gimmicky and something that would never catch on. Clearly I was proven wrong but it felt like it took a long time to reach that stage.

In hindsight it's no different to a lot of other breakthrough technologies. For example MP3 players took a few iterations before they became a viable competitor to existing portable music devices.

Oh yeah I totally remember that now too. They'd pick up all the dust on the counter/mat and freak out with low resolution spazzing.

Maybe you keep your place cleaner than many of us do...?

They probably perform quite well in a dust free environment.

Let me guess that you didn't have a cat at home, did you? :)

I did. A CueCat.

I remember them being terrible. Every round in counter-strike I'd be yelling that it was my mouse and not my aim. The ball was so dirty!

Terrible for FPS's in the dawn of internet fragging.

I still remember trying to clean my mouse ball between rounds. The dread you feel being in CT spawn, with your ball in your hand and a T coming around the corner...

I'd wager that how often one needed to clean the mouse varied by how often one washed their hands.

Also, I found those rare cleaning sessions to be nice cathartic breaks. But they certainly weren't every 15 minutes…

Well, the author is talking about doing artwork with a ball mouse, so the use case is definitely different than just web browsing.

But they were actually that bad. Rollers were always gunked up. Had to get the tweezers out to get it really clean, but it was useless, it just got dirty again. You couldn't actually use a mechanical mouse on a desk in a pinch without a mouse pad (at least not my desk) whereas optical mice work on any non-reflective surface. I remember the first time I got an optical mouse I used it on my upper thigh for like a whole day just because I was so amazed it could do that!

Honestly, upgrading to optical mouse was a big deal to me. I upgraded in 2002.

Optical mice also have a surprising upside, the kids used to steal the balls out of the mice in the library or computer lab, so they had to be super glued shut. Meaning they worked about as well as a mouse without a ball.

I never encountered a dirty mouse until I got to college in 1999. At the time I didn't understand why someone would pay so much money for an optical mouse.

I think I only cleaned my ball mouse once or twice in college, but cleaned plenty of other people's mice for them. The ball mice were so easy to clean, about as easy as filling washer fluid or putting air in a tire.

Microsoft may have changed mice (I loved almost all their Intellimouse incarnations, and most of their other PC hardware like the awesome Sidewinder game controllers) but I find Apple's Magic Mouse to be closer to the ideal.

It's a multitouch surface with several independent axes of control: Moving the mouse itself on the desk, swiping your fingers anywhere on the surface, tapping the surface, pressing the surface, with different effects depending on the number of fingers, the direction of the swipe gestures or which side you tap/press on (emulating left and right buttons.)

The body/shape may not be everyone's cup of cacao and I still prefer the discrete steps of a physical mouse wheel when scrolling through content like a list of images (because they fly too many at a time with swipe gestures), but for everything else you can't beat the flexibility of a touch surface, especially when panning through 360° content which a 1-axis wheel can't do well, even with "tilt-scrolling."

A Magic Mouse with "taptic" feedback (with the optional sensation of discrete buttons under your fingers) may be the perfection we seek.

If you find the default set of options and gestures too limiting there's BetterTouchTool [1] which lets power users customize Apple's input devices including the Touch Bar.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ae/shop/product/MLA02ZM/A/magic-mouse-...

[1] https://folivora.ai

If only it wasn't so low that turned your hand into a claw, it would be quite good.

That mouse, like almost every other mouse made by Apple, is junk.

Now the Magic Trackpad, and the trackpad on the laptops...

I developed wrist pain from using that mouse. I wish Apple would care more about ergonomics.

Microsoft and Logitech have a couple of really great devices for people who have joint issues. And with programmable buttons, most of the gestures aren't really necessary (the only thing I miss is the nice horizontal scrolling)

Me to when I moved to using a mac mini my right hand pinkie finger started to ache - I then unpacked the 10 year old ps2 MS mouse and a 20 year old keyboard and switched to that.

I get terrible pain if I use the Magic Mouse for more than an house, which disappared after I switched to another mouse. One thing I dislike about the Magic Mouse is that if I rest my finger on the 'button' area it registers it as a click so I always have to hover my fingers above the 'button' area—something I suspect contributed to my pain. With normal mouses I can rest entire my hand and fingers over the mouse and the only force I have to do is when I press the buttons.

I'm sure it wouldn't solve your pain issue, but requiring a press to register a click is a setting you can change.

Same here. My wrist wouldn't work with it. I don't understand why Apple insisted on the "flatness" of Magic Mouse.

I often wonder if people inside Apple Park actually use the mouse themselves.

I find the Apple mice unusable. I don't enjoy the feel of the "rails" underneath the mouse. But the biggest crime is the fact that you can't use the mouse while charging it, because the USB-C charging port is underneath the device!

You have to charge it for barely an hour or 2 once a/every other month. I've owned a Magic Mouse for a couple years and I never felt that the charging port was a problem. You just do it during sleep.

Though I suppose it should have had the port in front to look less silly and maybe offer increased DPI on a cabled connection.

Not so. As these devices get older, the batteries don't last as long. For a low-power device like the mouse, dropping out to 1/4 or less of its battery capacity basically makes it unusable, since you're charging weekly or even daily. Miss charging it before you leave work to go home? Too bad the next day! No mouse for you! And what happens when the battery dies entirely? No more mouse. Period.

Then what. Buy another $100 mouse? I don't think so.

Putting the charge port on the bottom is just a stupid product choice.

Not to mention, the vagueness of the presses is terrible design as well. The whole thing is just not useful.

Aside maybe the first commercial devices, I don't think Apple have every designed a useful mouse. They hung on to the single button design for far too long then over compensated with the magic mouse. And the ergonomics for nearly all of their mice since the iMac era have been terrible (where design was always placed above usability and comfort).

Latest gen MacBooks aside, people would always praise Apple - often deservingly so - for the quality of their hardware however their mice have always felt several steps behind what was on offer on PCs in terms of real world practicalities.

I feel like this is on purpose. How could it be a mistake, Apple has legendary design sense? I think it's to discourage people from using the mouse while its charging, and thus undermining what distinguishes the product. Regardless of the truth, I find it to be unfriendly to the consumer.

I think its just because charging ports are "ugly" so they tried to hide it at the expense of functionality.

*Lightning port.

I love the idea of the Magic Mouse, and loathe the ergonomics. After multiple attempts over the years (both v1 and v2) I switched full time to the Magic Trackpad.

The Logitech MX Master is the best mouse I’ve ever used, hands down. I just ran into too many unpredictable connection issues on the MBP.

I tried the Magic Mouse, and really wanted to like it... I just couldn't :(.

It's a great concept. I think it might even have been (or is yet to be) a game-changing concept - but it was killed by the terrible ergonomics, lack of adoption by users, and lack of software support.

Lately I've found myself doing more 3D modeling. Most of that is in Autodesk Fusion 360, but I've also been enjoying Shapr3D on my iPad Pro. Shapr3D is especially nice because it relies upon (and requires) an Apple Pencil to function, and a lot of basic modeling tasks are extremely intuitive and fast as a result. It's not what I would consider a mature product yet - at least, not for my needs, others likely find it more comprehensive - but it shows a great deal of promise. When I go back to Fusion 360 on my desktop to work on something complex, I find myself missing the flexibility of the multi-touch display for view control combined with the precision of the Apple Pencil for object placement and modification.

The Magic Mouse would have been great for this. I could easily see moving it being used to create/modify geometry, while the touch surface could be used to manipulate the viewpoint. It would be very powerful - and actually, might exist. I'll have to check that out :). At any rate, though, I've never seen the Magic Mouse advertised in this sort of context, nor have I seen rich MM support advertised by the software vendors I use.

In other words, for the MM concept to take off, I think it needs to be demand-side driven. It needs to make someone's life easier, not just be cool. That isn't going to happen unless and until there's a flexible API for developers to leverage its utility, developers use it to build some really awesome functionality that can't be replicated elsewhere, and people are made aware of that.

> In other words, for the MM concept to take off ...

The "MM concept" has already taken off: in the form of billions of smartphones.

Its gestures and scrolling behavior are most natural for someone coming in from smartphones/tablets to personal computers, and mostly identical to Apple trackpad gestures in any case.

Most software does not require any special development to handle Magic Mouse gestures; they are mapped to common events like zoom/pan by the OS API, which are shared with the MacBook trackpad and thus already supported by all well-written apps.

Developers DO need to take the MM into account to provide extra, hand-tuned support for its features. The apps you described and games are where its advantages fall apart the most noticeably. Though, you may be able to use BetterTouchTool to "hack" MM support into third-party apps.

The last time I bought a Magic Mouse it lasted about 30 minutes. I installed some apps, loaded my family photos, then decided to try my favourite first person shooter and have some fun in high detail settings.

Right-click to zoom in the sniper rifle and - dang it, I can't shoot! The top is a single surface, so you can't hold down the right button and left click at the same time. Checks settings - no way to re-map aim to the keyboard.

MagicMouse -> Bin

No love for that particular peripheral myself but; That’s completely on you, the Magic Mouse was never marketed as a gaming mouse. You can of course argue that it should be capable of what you expect from a mouse, but this is obviously a concept mouse aimed at doing other things.

I don’t see it as being a gaming specific issue, that’s just incidental. Why would anyone deliberately design an input device, so that the operation of different buttons was mechanically coupled in such a way as to arbitrarily limit their use in combination? I can easily imagine graphical design apps where you might want to do similar click-drag-alt/click combos. Or you might have a context menu opened by holding down the right mouse button, with checkboxes or multi-selectable options on it.

The answer is that "one button mouse" is a core part of Apple's identity, and having real independent buttons would mean admitting that it was a mistake.

That's been true for every Apple mouse I've used and it's embarrassing that it's still the case. Between that and having to put the mouse on its back to charge, Apple is being brazenly ignorant. Sometimes I wonder if they even use their own products.

I don't think Apple ever had a mouse with truly discrete left & right mouse buttons. Ever since the mighty mouse, they've used a single switch for both buttons but used touch sensors to differentiate between left and right clicks.

Careful, you’re baiting the anti-Apple police.

I remember when my school got a handful of Macintosh computers in the early 90s.

My friend's mom came into the classroom for a parent day shortly after, and I remember my friend asking her to try out this new cool thing.

When he was showing her the mouse and keyboard, she picked up the mouse and rolled the little rubber ball on the underside around with her finger to move the cursor.

We all got a kick out of it at the time. Now that I have young children, I wonder what my moment of "don't really get how this is supposed to work" will be when my kids show me some new technology.

No, your friend's mom was correct. She was figuring out that the trackball is superior to the mouse. It was obvious to her.

Yep.

I used a Microsoft Trackball Optical for many years, and found it much easier on my hands. After some time I found that I was much more accurate with it as well, and about as fast as using a mouse. I played a lot of CS with that trackball, and I never once felt it held me back.

I did get made fun of a few times at LAN parties when I whipped that thing out, though!

I miss LAN parties :(

I was also among the first to get the optical MS mouse - the days of cleaning lint were finally over! I jumped over to the MS Trackball Optical on developing onset of RSI though - until laser mice by Logitech just ended up feeling comfortable enough in my hand (the G9X).

Presently I have a Kensington Slimblade and a Logitech G903 at home - trackball on left, mouse on right.

It feels like I've reached a certain pinnacle of tech here; both products are great. Due to RSI I try to mix up my hand usage; I've become ambidextrous as far as input controllers are concerned.

LAN parties are great. When getting older, it's good for your mental health to set aside some time to just hang out with friends - even if it's just once or twice a year.

Elecom makes some good modern trackballs. I personally use the thumb style track balls. I was getting severe pain in my shoulder (Mouse Shoulder) from using standard mice. Going back to my beloved thumb trackball has save my shoulder.

For many years I've used a basic Kensington Orbital. I've got one on my desk at work. Our computers get refreshed every three years, but the IT guys know anyone who tries to take away my trackball will lose a hand.

I love the Kensington Orbital, flicking the trackwheel has become second nature for scrolling through console output or long webpages. I do miss a middle button occasionally though.

I might take a look at one of these Elecom trackballs or the 'expert' Kensington with four buttons

I didn't really enjoy that article because I find it to thin on technical history and engineering.

It's mostly about one man's experience with buying a computer mouse.

The premise is totally correct though, and not just "one man's experience": that generation of MS mice changed the mainstream mouse landscape towards laser-based mice.

(I've used such before, on Sun workstations, but PC as users we didn't have that luxury, we had the easy to clog and collect dust, potentially jumpy, not very accurate balls in our mice).

To be fair, they beat the rest of the market to optical mice by a few months, but everybody used the same third party sensor/chip.

The shape was also way better than anything that existed back then (from what I recall).

Since Microsoft don't have anything in the same segment anymore I have a brutally hard time to purchase a mouse today.

We had an optical Mouse Systems mouse for our Mac Classic in the early 90's, they weren't exclusively the domain of expensive Sun machines.

I had the Mouse Systems A+ optical mouse with the metal mousepad for my Mac SE, and it was great for the time.

I've recently watched a review of one of those, paired with a computer from back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBhA25qjL8Q

Here you go - Oral History of Gary Gordon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxxoWhCzIeU HP engineer (later Avago), inventor of the sensor.

The TI Explorer LISP machine from the 1980s had an optical mouse. What I recall about the Microsoft mouse is that it was a broadly available affordable optical mouse. I have vivid memories cleaning my Amiga mouse with a Velcro ball and pad contraption.

No, that's not it. Sun Microsystems had optical mice too, back in the early 90s, on their SPARCstations.

The difference was that the early optical mice required a special mousepad for them to work. I think they just used some photodiodes and looked at the reflections from the mousepad, which had a pattern built in. The optical mouse starting with MS's worked in a different way, using an actual camera to track movement, so you could use them on almost any surface.

I remember those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems

The pad did indeed have a special reflective pattern.

There was also a circular-shaped mouse from that era, now I can't remember if it was DEC or Sun.

DEC had a puck mouse with two tilted wheels on the bottom.

I used one of those. It actually kinda worked. Some internet digging finds a picture:

https://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/hawley/wheels.shtml

I actually switched from using Mouse Systems optical mice to a Intelimouse Explorer, I never really used any ball mice, ever

@magduf has the correct answer. The Sun optical mouse used dual photodiodes and had two grids in the mousepad. One blue, one red. The filters on the photo diodes allowed one to see both x & y grid lines and the other to see only the red stripes. Then based on their signalling you could extract a motion vector. The upside was no ball to pick up dirt and clog sensors, the downside was you needed the mousepad with the lines etched on it. You would also get less reliable results if the mouse pad was not in the expected orientation with the mouse.

Still I really enjoyed that mouse. It had excellent tactile feedback on the buttons as well.

It was a single IR LED and four sensors as I recall. They had some Sun workstations (used mostly for circuit simulations) in mid-90's at the university where my mother used to work. I was in the middle school at the time and very interested in anything electronics. Still am. Blue LEDs went mainstream few years later.

>It had excellent tactile feedback on the buttons as well.

Almost everything had better tactile feedback back then. It's sad how this is no longer valued.

Mouse Systems I think it was had a PC mouse that used a special pad as well. Late 80s or so.

Even later - I own a Mac and a PC version of these mice - the earlier ones were actually serial mice.

In my past experience the Sun optical mousepads worked OK in single user environments, where people kept the pads undamaged and clean. Generally, in 1993 if you worked for a university or company that cared to put a $5000 (in 1993 dollars!) computer on your desk, you would treat everything associated with it with care.

They worked considerably less well in university shared computer lab environments where the pads were subject to more wear and tear.

I used those three button optical SPARC mice, and the bigger issue than the fact that you needed a special mousepad, was that the pad had to stay properly oriented. If the pad was rotated slightly, your mouse would go in strange directions.

Thanks! Just got flashbacks to surfing the world wide web on a Sparc Station.

Also, in our CS lab anyway, theft of the shiny mouse pads had evidently been an issue in the past, and they were often glued or otherwise attached permanently to the desks.

But why? And who? No student back then (early 90s) could even dream of affording a SparcStation, which were the only workstations which used the mouse that needed the shiny mats.

We had various types of Sun machines in the labs, from the IPX and 5, up to dual processor 20s, and they needed an (expensive, maybe 200Mb) SCSI disk to boot from. Video was to a chunky high resolution (i recall OpenLook on 1152x900 grayscale was awesome, or the expensive option, 1280x1024 colour) monitor with RGB plus sync input using that weird 13W3 socket with the wee coax connectors inside. For networking you had to embrace the world of AUI media converters and so forth, which was just annoying. Anyway, all that stuff would have cost essentially the same as a nice Mercedes or a suburban house...

Maybe people used the muse mats as bird scarers? Perhaps they dropped too much LSD and just stared at the shiny pattern? Stealth teams of research assistants might be sent to fetch replacements for their professor's workstation, after running out of funding, but needing a new one having used his as a coffee mat and broken it? Or I suppose they could have been stolen by accident, not knowing what they were, by someone who was blinded by staring at the little laser under the mouse...

The Xerox Star / Viewpoint mice used cheap paper mouse pads with a black and white stipple texture, that you could print out on a laser printer or photocopy.

But you could not Xerox them, because Xerox is not a verb!!!

https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2017/07/xerox-is-not-verb....

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/npr.40401103...

https://www.billbuxton.com/input02.Devices.pdf

The Xerox 6085 “Viewpoint” Mouse (1985)

The mice released with the Xerox Star 8010 workstation and its successors, like the 6085, all had 2 buttons, despite the earlier research mice having three. This was to reduce confusion. They didn’t go to 1 button like Apple, however because their studies showed that any reduced confusion came at the expense of added selection errors. (Johnson, Roberts, Verplank, Smith, Irby, Beard & Mackey, 1989).

The Mouse Systems M1 Optical Mouse (1982)

This was the first commercially available optical mouse. Like most mice at the time, it had three buttons. Unlike today’s optical mice, the M1 needed a glass pad for optical sensing.

https://www.billbuxton.com/inputTimeline.html

1981 Optical Mouse. Independently developed by Steven Kirsch, Mouse Systems and Richard A. Lyon.

The optical mouse avoided the problem of dust and dirt accumulating in the mechanisms of mechanical mice. Kirsch's mouse was commercialized by his company, Mouse Systems in 1982 (upper image to the right). A mouse based on Lyon's technology was incorporated into Xerox's 6085 "Viewpoint" workstation,which replaced the 8010 Star workstation in 1985 (lower image to the right). Unlike today’s optical mice, both of these early designs required a special mouse pad with a pattern on it that the optics used to track movement. The Mouse System's pad, seen in the first image to the right, was made of glass, while Lyon's, seen in the second image to the right, was made of paper (and hence one could make a replacement using a laser printer). You can print out your own copy of Lyon's paper pad from here.

Lyon, Richard. Imaging Array. US Patent 4521773, Filed Aug 28, 1981; Issued June 4, 1985.

Kirsch, Steven T. Electro-Optical Mouse. US Patent 4364035. Filed June 15, 1981; Issued: Dec. 14, 1982.

Johnson, J., Roberts, T.L., Verplank, W., Smith, D.C., Irby, C.H., Beard, M., Mackey, K. (1989). The Xerox Star: A Retrospective, IEEE Computer, 22 (9), 11 – 26. Product brochure for Xerox 6085 Viewpoint workstation (1985).

> The difference was that the early optical mice required a special mousepad for them to work

Yeah, the article mentions this too.

Why was this such a big deal? Just include the pad with the mouse. Using a pad is nice anyway. It's not like you'd be carrying the mouse around with you, given that laptops weren't much of a thing yet.

Yes, like the iPod it wasn't the first such product sold, or even the most full featured one: just the first that actually mattered and turned the market.

I was so excited when they announced that they were bringing this back as the IntelliMouse Classic. It's amazing how much they got right that most mice today don't get right.

I think my first experience with an optical mouse was on a Data General unix workstation around 1990 or so. It needed a special pad; the pad was metal and had a grid pattern on it. The mouse was somewhat less responsive than ball mice at the time.

I still use the original cream Intellimouse Optical [1] and have bought a stash of them for the future. I’m yet to find anything as ergonomic to use

[1] http://www.bluetoothmousetech.com/microsoft-intellimouse-opt...

To me is the best mouse ever created.

There are much better and more comfortable mice now. Logitech's MX line of wireless mice are more comfortable and precise. Their gaming mice are also better if you prefer wired.

I prefer the Logitech M705.

The toggle-able free-spinning scroll wheel on the M705 was a game-changer for me. When I got the mouse, I was working for a place that had a lot of buggy spaghetti-code programs that interfaced with a massive database, and I often ended up manually scrolling through million-row tables in Toad correcting broken or missing data. It made my life sooo much easier.

I later upgraded to a MX Master ($100) which automatically enables free-spinning mode when you scroll quickly. It's fully adjustable, and it works super well.

I use this one as well. I think it's my long term choice. I got one for work and home. Battery lasts ages, wireless is pretty good. I do notice that a big ol' wifi router next to it will interfere...

Same, but the regular WMO without side buttons. Simple, comfortable, and flicking the scrollwheel scrolls perfectly fast with little effort.

I got one of these when it first came out. It cost something like $45cdn, which was absurd at the time for just a basic mouse, but it was so worth it never to have to clean that ball thing again. It worked just great until about 5 or 6 years ago when it was destroyed in a fire.

For me it was Logitech that forever changed my mousing experience somewhere in early 2000. Their Logitech Optical USB mouse (this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Logitech-Optical-Mouse-But...) was the first optical mouse on the market here. It was outrageously expensive for my teenager budget, but with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter and some Windows utility to tweak the OS refresh rate it gave me a real advantage in Unreal Tournament. No more gunk messing up accuracy. I used it for years and if I’d still have it, I don’t doubt that it would still work.

It's been years since I've even thought about tweaking sampling rates for mice.

I have been using a series Intellimouse 1.1 Opticals since the early 2000's but they are getting harder to find now.

Even when sold "new" now (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682610...) they seem to be old stock or factory seconds and do not sit level or have one or more broken buttons.

Any suggestions for a replacement? The new Intellimouse Classic does not have the right side button.

Check out this comment:

> Today, I use the SteelSeries Sensei models which kind of are modern versions of this mouse: https://steelseries.com/gaming-mice/sensei-raw [0]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851273

I replaced an 2001 or 2002 Intellimouse with a Sensei a few years ago. Then it broke and I got a warranty replacement (upgraded to the full model). Then THAT broke and I replaced it with a Logitech (which is fine, although I spilled coffee all over it).

Meanwhile, the Intellimouse is still 100% functional in my laptop bag.

My Intellimice last for a few years but eventually either the rubber coating on the scroll wheel detaches or the left button starts occasionally double clicking instead of single clicking.

I'll try out the Sensei, thanks.

Both my Sensei's developed issues with the scroll wheel.

Otherwise they're really nice.

IIRC mine once had some issue with the scroll wheel that I fixed by removing a dust ball and / or applying silicone grease. Silicone grease is great for lubricating anything plastic.

I lost one Sensei to a persistent squeak of the wheel, but the one I have now has been working for me for a while now. I still have an Intellimouse in fading white-to-yellow but it's like having a classic car -- I'm not willing to take it out for a drive.

Missed that, thanks!

Sadly SteelSeries cant figure out the scroll, uses very cheap design to minimize part count (even on top $100 model WTF), and in effect scrolling down develops a squeal when clear plastic shaft supported only on ONE SIDE does micro skips while rubbing on bare $0.1 microswitch surface

https://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/content/4/8/4857_19_steelser...

I bought one of these as a replacement, once all of mine had died.

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-HDQ-00001-Classic-Intellimo...

They feel the same, but work better

You're bound to find something that suits you in the Zowie range. They make eight mice, all with identical features, all with perfect sensors and all based on subtle variations of the Intellimouse shapes.

https://zowie.benq.com/en/product/mouse.html

The Logitech G Pro Wireless might also be a good choice.

https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/gaming-mice/pro-wir...

You want to look at the "EC" series. There's 2 sizes and a 2nd generation just came out.

The EC series is based on the IME 3.0, which has an asymmetrical shape. The FK and ZA series have a symmetrical design based on the IMO 1.0, with the ZA being slightly taller to suit palm grippers.

Zowie scroll wheel is true garbage, $80 mouse and it binds to the side of plastic case.

I recall using that 3-button SPARC mouse on a rigid, semi-reflective, gridded mouse pad, and also a Logitech optical trackball, with patterned black dots on a red marble, long before optical mouse tech could work on any surface.

If you waited until the MS Intellimouse to go optical to relieve your Photoshop woes, you weren't being very proactive. I even recall using a Wacom stylus-tablet, and I wasn't even a graphics creator or manipulator.

I'd argue that those mouses from around 2000 with the vibration motors in them were more revolutionary to mousing, as it allowed for cheap haptic feedback. It's really too bad the TouchSense tech wasn't licensed loosely enough by Immersion to get more than annoying toy applications for it to alter your desktop experience (and Black & White). Every time I get a little vibration bump through my finger on a touchscreen, I remember that could have already been everywhere 15 years ago.

I had the same recollection - I'm pretty sure I used a Sun Workstation with an optical mouse back in the late 80s. Clearly Microsoft did not invent the optical mouse, but the early ones required a special gridded pad.

In the old days the most under appreciated Microsoft division was Microsoft Hardware. Keyboards and mice were top notch.

I started to use an Anker[0] mouse few years (1-2?) ago for work and I can't turn back.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B018LR04B8/ref=psdcmw_1103649...

Same here, 2+ years now

I have a similar ergonomic mouse. Once you get used to it, it's fantastic. One day I forgot my usb receiver and had to use a normal mouse and it was a bad day.

I've bought three so far. Work, Home and one for an ex absolutely love them.

No mouse discussion would be complete without mention of the greatest mouse ever made, the Logitech MX Revolution. Logitech would truly outshine themselves if they merged the MX Revolution and the G602.

Have you tried the Logitech M705? I find it to be the perfect mouse.

Not enough buttons IMO

Funny you should say that - I've always loved Logitech's gaming mice, and found their wireless versions to be especially good for productive work as well. For a long time I had automatic profiles set up for different software that remapped the buttons of my G602 to perform all sorts of actions.

About two years ago I switched to a desktop for gaming, and shortly thereafter went with a wired mouse (a SteelSeries Rival 500). My G602 lives on as my 10-year-old daughter's mobile mouse for her laptop, though. That thing is ancient and still going strong.

I like Logitech G400s, it feels very ergonomic.

MX518 was popular also, right?!

(They actually re-released it recently)

The greatest mouse ever made is the MX518. I've been using mine since 2007, and I bought one as a backup a few years back.

Logitech just re-released it and I may buy one out of curiosity.

I was just thinking about how much I miss cleaning compacted dirt off of the wheels inside of my mouse. It was so satisfying.

edit: not being sarcastic at all. I actually miss the cleaning.

I am left-handed and the IntelliMouse Optical was my favorite mouse. It broke after a couple of years and then I just bought three of them in bulk packaging for the same price!

Today, I use the SteelSeries Sensei models which kind of are modern versions of this mouse: https://steelseries.com/gaming-mice/sensei-raw

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19778672

I'm still using that exact same mouse. It's my lucky programming mouse I've been using since 2008.

I remember being pretty good at scraping the hardened goo off the rollers with my finger nail.

I remember paying some ridiculous amount for an intellimouse explorer in 1999 or so, and being so thrilled (and baffled) that Microsoft provided drivers for it.

Fantastic mouse. I still have it, though it started having some issues

We also forget that in 1999, Microsoft was a massive monopoly that consumed everything in the tech industry... Now innovation comes from all directions, the tech industry can breathe!

There were many hardware manufacturers then, as now. Perhaps the hardware division benefitted from name recognition afforded by the OS monopoly but there was no monopoly there. Around 98-01, IMO they genuinely had the best mice and keyboards.

They still do if you ask me. They seem to be good at simple and durable designs.

Anecdotally I am convinced at best they changed how we mouse for about 15 years, if indeed a significant portion of people still mouse.

Just reminded me the asheron's call developer named devilmouse.

> (Tabs hadn’t been invented yet.)

Wow, so true.

I remember this!

And to this day their OS still considers the scroll wheel on top of it to be part of the keyboard.

I abandoned windows on my home machines because of a Microsoft mouse.

I had bought a new asus netbook. I intended to put linux on it but it came with some sort of student edition of windows. I thought I'd at least see how well ran out of the box. So I plugged in my decade-old and trustworthy MS mouse. "Need to connected to internet to download drive for external mouse" ... windows was then dead to me.

How long ago was that>

I have not had a mouse, wired or wireless, fail to function in windows, internet connection or not. They all just work almost instantly.

2007? 2008? - It was the student edition on a $150 netbook. I plugged in the mouse shortly after turning it on. Maybe if I had fully booted into windows ... but once I stopped laughing shut it down and installed backtrack.

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