Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

>It didn’t come with a cap on the TrackPoint, so I swiped a proper “classic dome” from the spares that came with my T60p to make everything period correct (aside: why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are cheap and everywhere). I still don’t care for Trackpoints, but it has cachet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461

>Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2] or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written up and published the story. [3]

>[...]

>Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!

>He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.

> why are classic dome caps so expensive these days? The soft domes are cheap and everywhere

The older sandpaper TrackPoint caps can scratch your display surface. Though some of the softer ones will also mark the display surface, but not as badly.

I have a small stockpile of caps of different kinds, including some originals (and in nonstandard colors), usually end up using the soft shallow concave or shallow convex ones.

Even if you mix up the colors, you can't escape the distinctive branding. Maybe several years ago, during an I-don't-wear-logos phase, I was using a ThinkPad T60 with black TrackPoint cap, and with black labelmaker tape carefully cut to obscure the branding. One day, I was sitting on the grass in front of the public library. Some group of kindergarteners is cutting across the grass, and one of them glances at my ThinkPad with the blacked-out branding, and immediately says, to no one in particular, "thassa IBM!" I would've gotten away with being branding-free, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

(Author's HN account) Hmm. Maybe I'll leave the cap off in storage, then. I do remember some of my more modern ThinkPads getting a screen dot from their TrackPoints, but those machines spent a lot of time in backpacks getting lugged around.

I don't recall whether the 560E was susceptible to TrackPoint marks, nor pressure marks. I definitely did get both on some of my ThinkPads of that era that saw lots of carrying in backpacks.

BTW, thank you for the writeup on the 560E. It's a good little laptop, and a lot of open source work was done on it, sitting in parks and cafes. :)

Oh how I'll miss my hands never leaving the keyboard when I have to give up my T430 for another brand... Ted Selker be blessed.

Those patents must be due to expire soon if they haven’t already. Maybe system76 can save us?

In order for System76 to save us, Clevo would have to save us, first (since the former sells rebranded laptops manufactured by the latter, last I checked).

Dell and HP already offer TrackPoint-equivalents on their Latitudes/Precisions and EliteBooks (respectively) and have been doing so for more than a decade now, so it seems the patents are definitely expired. I feel like the IBM/Lenovo version is higher-quality, though.

Wikipedia claims:

> Since ThinkPad computers have a nub that is responsive to pressure in a direction, and there is a patent for this,[citation needed] other companies have made it so a person has to move the finger a large distance to cause the nub to rock from side to side in a much less efficient way.

Oh don't start me on elitebook and HP's 'trackpoints'... So disappointing. Maybe it's the drivers, maybe it's some kind of placebo effect but the thinkpad one is and always has been so much better...

Well yeah, that's HP for ya, lol

The Dell ones are a bit better, but still nowhere near the same quality as a proper TrackPoint.

I really wish some of the good mechanical keyboard makers would integrate a trackpoint. -- unicomp did one but the response curve was all wrong and it was basically unusable (mine also died after a couple weeks-- which I didn't mind.)

Even when you have plenty of room for a mouse the trackpoint is just better for switching. I think my ideal desktop setup would have a nice mechanical keyboard with trackpoint and a mouse-- the trackpoint isn't ideal for drawing but it's better for most other things.

There are the bluetooth lenovo keyboards, -- their trackpoint is good, but I'd only describe the keyboard as good 'for a laptop keyboard'.

[My idea of a good keyboard, trackpoint aside, is the 122 key model-f terminal keyboard I use.]

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