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Yeah, we had these Sun ones in the lab at university back in '96(ish). They'd probably been there a few years even then.

'Course they were reliant on the special mat, and the mat had to be oriented correctly. I suppose you might say they weren't really a consumer offering though, which the article mentions. The price of Sun systems kept them in business ajd education facilities.

I'm guessing that's what the Wikipedia article means by "modern": able to work on most any surface, not just a special mat.

I remember using one of those mid nineties - I think is was a Sun workstation. It had a metallic mouse pad with a grid pattern etched into it.

According to http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/xerox/star8010.shtml Xerox had an optical mouse in 1981, I know for sure it had one in 1985 because that was when I was using them.

There were three button optical mice on many SGI workstations too, if I recall