20 Years Ago, Microsoft Changed How We Mouse Forever' (gizmodo.com) 267
Gizmodo contributing editor Andrew Liszewski remembers April 14, 1999, "when at the COMDEX expo in Las Vegas, a now-defunct trade show similar to today's CES, Microsoft announced its IntelliMouse Explorer: a mouse that traded the dirt sucking rolling ball for LEDs and a digital camera that could optically track the mouse's movements with extreme precision."
Based on technology developed by Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft's IntelliMouse Explorer arrived with a price tag that could be justified by even cash-strapped students like me. Even better, the underside of the mouse was completely sealed, preventing even the tiniest speck of dirt from penetrating its insides, and it improved on its predecessors by working on almost any surface that wasn't too reflective. I remember getting back to my dorm room and plugging in the Explorer for the first time, wondering who had a rig fancy enough to use the included PS2 to USB adapter. There were undoubtedly a few driver installation hiccups along the way, but once Windows 98 was happy, I fired up Photoshop and strapped in for the smoothest mouse experience I'd ever had. Problem solved.
In addition to that game-changing optical sensor, the IntelliMouse Explorer also introduced a couple of extra programmable buttons which seemed unnecessary to me at first, but it soon became an indispensable way to browse the web, letting me quickly jump forward and back between sites. (Tabs hadn't been invented yet.) It didn't take long for Microsoft's competitors to follow with optical mice of their own. Apple's arrived the year after in 2000, and in 2004, Logitech introduced a mouse powered by lasers. Extra buttons -- lots of them -- would eventually become the industry norm, and companies would soon find themselves competing with each other to see who could introduce the most accurate optical tracking technology to appeal to picky PC gamers.
I can count on my fingers the number of times a technology has thoroughly improved my life -- more often than not they tend to complicate things as well. (I'm looking at you, iPhone.) But 20 years later, the IntelliMouse Explorer is an upgrade that changed everything without any downside.
In addition to that game-changing optical sensor, the IntelliMouse Explorer also introduced a couple of extra programmable buttons which seemed unnecessary to me at first, but it soon became an indispensable way to browse the web, letting me quickly jump forward and back between sites. (Tabs hadn't been invented yet.) It didn't take long for Microsoft's competitors to follow with optical mice of their own. Apple's arrived the year after in 2000, and in 2004, Logitech introduced a mouse powered by lasers. Extra buttons -- lots of them -- would eventually become the industry norm, and companies would soon find themselves competing with each other to see who could introduce the most accurate optical tracking technology to appeal to picky PC gamers.
I can count on my fingers the number of times a technology has thoroughly improved my life -- more often than not they tend to complicate things as well. (I'm looking at you, iPhone.) But 20 years later, the IntelliMouse Explorer is an upgrade that changed everything without any downside.
"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Insightful)
sentence based on technology developed by Hewlett-Packard?
Really?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology by itself doesn't change anything. Products, which are basically technology applied, do.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Informative)
I have yet to see a product that uses a technology that has not been invented. Maybe you can provide an example?
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Funny)
Self-driving cars.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for spraying my coffee cup over my keyboard
At least it wasn't your mouse.
You haven't seen my amazing technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe their point is that technology without a product isn't useful.
Around 2005, I created some awesome technology that was very valuable to a lot of people. You never saw it, and never benefitted from it, because I'm not nearly as good at business as I am at technology. If Microsoft or Amazon had launched a product based on my technology, you would have benefitted. Without a better company building a product on my tech, only dozens of people got the benefit, rather than millions.
Re: (Score:2)
What's this technology exactly?
Re: (Score:2)
Every time I've heard that screed and spent the time to listen to the person, it turns out that they understood the extant demand for some combination of tech, wrote a block diagram showing how to divide the problem up, and then a couple years later they found out that some company patented an invention with the same block diagram a few months later. And they usually don't even realize that the timing implies the other company had been working on it for years.
Usually it is something that was obvious to engi
Re: (Score:2)
A technology that hasn't been applied is useless to you, perhaps, but it's the most useful thing in the world to a product developer.
There are minerals smarter than this guy (Score:2)
Someone like a product developer, perhaps?
Re: "Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:2)
You haven't been looking: https://stks.freshpatents.com/... [freshpatents.com]
Re: (Score:2)
This article is a great example of something that was already commonplace on other platforms before Microsoft decided to "discover" it. This is more of an ABM thing than a strictly Linux thing.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Insightful)
a mouse that traded the dirt sucking rolling ball for LEDs and a digital camera that could optically track the mouse's movements with extreme precision
I've always said that Microsoft is a pretty decent hardware company, it's only once they start dabbling in software that they make a mess of things.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
MS research is pretty awesome. Marketing is what screws it up.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: "Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:3)
MSFT keeps hitting new all-time highs. They're a long way from going IBM.
Re: (Score:3)
Not a bad summary of Microsoft! The running joke was that Microsoft never got the software right until version 3. :-)
Not too many people know that Microsoft has been in the hardware business from at least 1980. At one time they sold an Apple ][ 16KB Language Card [applelogic.org] and a Z80 Co-Processor daughterboard that you run CP/M, but more importantly, Wordstar on it.
I still have one if their "dove bar" mice and the Trackball Explorer (which is still bloody expensive to buy today.)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm still using my 1.0 Explorer. A few years back I thought it was finally dying, but it just turned it the cable was fatigued where it went into the mouse. No glue holding things together... just a few Phillips screws and snaps and IIRC the cable actually goes into a terminal block on the main board. Just trimmed the cable up 3", restripped and reattached.
The rubberized coating on the buttons and the metal flake coating are gone though. Still, I have it paired with a model M as a testament to non-disposabi
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft still needs to take the blame for going to a two button mouse format when the rest of the world used three buttons.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been *nix-only, not only on servers but desktops too, since the 90s. Mostly Linux.
MS keyboards have always been the best of the regular-priced keyboards. Nobody comes close. There are cheaper ones that are "good enough," and there are expensive ones that are better. But an MS keyboard will last a long time with consistent performance.
There was a time when Kensington was better, but that didn't last.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, back in '95, I was using an optical mouse attached to a SPARCstation [oldmouse.com] based on the one Mouse Systems came out with in 1984.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Informative)
The difference, the optical mice before our current technology generally required a specific mouse pad to track on. The mouse MS introduced worked on any surface with a visible enough texture that the sensor could track movement and said surface wasn't transparent glass or a mirror.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, but TFA would have us believe that the incremental improvement was some out of the blue miracle technological leap.
Of course as has been pointed out, the technology for any surface optical mice was developed by HP and spun off into Agilent, which is why so many other optical mice came out so soon after MS's.
Meanwhile, the zillions of extra buttons were hardly a MS innovation.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, but TFA would have us believe that the incremental improvement
Yeah, nah. Sorry but being tethered to a specific surface vs being able to be used on something as amazing as ... a desk. That's not an incremental improvement. In many ways the ball mouse was vastly superior to anything that required a specific mouse mat, and even the first Intellimouse got absolutely lambasted for not working on shiny surfaces.
When they got them working on shiny surfaces *that* was on an incremental improvement. When the technology was made available to the general public on their incredibly varied surfaces at which they sit and work on a daily basis, that was a breakthrough.
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference, the optical mice before our current technology generally required a specific mouse pad to track on.
The SPARCStation mouse used a pad with a fine grid of horizontal blue lines and vertical red lines. A great trick was when the guy in the next cubicle went to the toilet, you could rotate his mousepad 90 degrees. Hee hee. Boy does that bring back memories. Great times in cubeville!!!
Re:"Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:5, Informative)
The Sparcstation mice were also much more precise for drawing than the modern, pad-less optical mice.
Re: (Score:2)
They were also incredibly irritating as you'd constantly run off the edge off the pad. After that, I made sure never to use a mouse that required a pad again.
Re: (Score:2)
I still can't really use any mice without a pad. They often don't work well on plain featureless surfaces.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, they tended to be very cold, and uncomfortable to rest your hand on for long.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that at the time an affordable optical mouse was a good thing. It's just that Microsoft didn't invent the concept. Also, their mouse kinda sucked; two buttons, a weird shape, etc. They proved once again that Microsoft did things their own way without any insight gained from looking at what customers used and wanted.
Both, actually (Score:5, Informative)
I do remember they had special mouse mats. Having said that my (admittedly hazy) memory from the time was that they made the movements more precise but weren't actually necessary.
I am pretty sure all mice before the one MS introduced required the specific pad because those optical mice were not camera based. They were IR LED based and actually counted pulses reflected back by the pad. Once the camera was introduced you could track on any surface that the camera could see a texture on so that it was able to tell which way the mouse was moving by comparing the current image to the previous one.
According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], you are both right: there were two different designs at the dawn of optical mices, the "decode grid from the pad" (Kirsch design) and the "compare successive 16x16 pictures" (Lyon design) but still being helped a lot by a mouse pad because you can guess what the sensor quality and processing power could be in the 80s (but purely in theory, it could work on any other appropriate surface given that its texture is visible enough to the picture sensor in its infrared spectrum).
The so touted "revolution" of Microsoft is that they were among the first to mass-market it (it's not an expensive gadget for architect to digitize their plans on) and relying on newer generations of sensors+processors by HP and more modern optics that made the mouse a little bit more capable on everyday random surfaces, meaning slightly less reliance on mouse pad compared to the older mice.
So they were hardly the first, but they managed to beat Logitech bit a tiny bit of time in bringing a cheap and simple optical mouse for the masses.
Re: (Score:2)
I do remember that the early Microsoft optical mice still needed a reasonable mousepad with a pattern on it. A plain white pad or a desktop often did not work so well.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia is garbage information. Jack Hawley invented a sealed ball-less mouse with optical sensors on the inside. I had a 9-pin serial one made by Honeywell and it worked on any surface, even my leg.
AE911Truth Org
By some strange coincidence, I still happen to have that exact mouse in my parts box. I couldn't part with it, it's so odd and useful.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
first Optical mouse was shipped with the Xerox STAR ... Before Windows, and Apple ...
Re: (Score:2)
Same here, we were using these on the SPARC stations in my university's lab in 1994.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, way back when HP actually spent heaps of cash on R&D, when they engaged in blue-sky dreaming to think up new technologies without having to immediately worry about an industry solution. HP, Kodak and Xerox were three of the most innovative companies around, investing millions and millions of dollars into pure research. Then they stoped funding R&D unless the engineers could directly show that whatever they wanted to invent would lead directly to profitable, market applications. Now look where
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. It may surprise you that a company can develop a technology and the not be the same ones to bring it to market much less the one that popularizes it.
Kodak developed the digital camera sensor. Fuji was the first to put something you can buy on the market. Kodak then spent years bolting their stuff on the bottom of Nikon bodies, never releasing a camera of their own until they went bankrupt.
Or does it surprise you that a company that was once heavily dependent on R&D and a patent portfolio doesn't pr
Re: (Score:3)
Really? So the DC-120 in my box of old crap was made by the faeries?
Re: "Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:2)
In this case making optical mice cheap and idiot proof likely qualifies, MS turning Kinect into a $100 toy (from a $20k+ robotics dev kit) would have qualified if anyone had much cared. Apple pushing 'airport' is in a similar vein: they didn't invent 802
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually invented at Xerox 10 years before
Re: "Microsoft changed ..." and then in the same (Score:2)
Sure. Everyone credits Apple for productizing Xerox's ideas, why not credit MS for productizing HP's?
Re: (Score:2)
And based on ideas that were around before then as well. I used optical mice on a Sun 1; it needed a special pad but essentially the concept was there and in use. I think what MS did was make an affordable mass-market version, as opposed to a high end pro product.
Re: (Score:2)
In defense of ball mice (Score:2)
With ball mice there was a constant issue of cleaning the rollers, but how much, and how much did the dirt affect usage, varied a lot between different quality mice. A cheap OEM mouse you had to clean constantly, but a more expensive Logitech didn't need nearly as much cleaning.
Playing Unreal Tournament semi-competitively back in the day, the Logitech Mouseman Plus I was using offered an advantage over optical mice, which I kind of miss to this day. If you picked the mouse up from the desk a few millimeters
Re: (Score:2)
There was a better technology that ball mice that was not optical. Axley inclined rotating feet. I remember using then at University of some Dec Workstations
https://www.thingiverse.com/th... [thingiverse.com]
I had a Honeywell version for a PC, but it was serial and well I then got a laptop and a serial mouse didn't cut the mustard.
Then camera based optical mice came out and it was game over for mechanically sensed mouse movement.
Re: (Score:2)
The bottom was easily superglued.
Scroll wheel is an even bigger change (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The scroll wheel is what has enabled the modern web to be unbearable.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm with you on the scroll wheel. For the average person the problems with the mouse wheel were a minor annoyance that a decent (and clean) mouse pad could mitigate.
On the other hand, the optical mouse did wipe out the mouse pad industry almost overnight. You can't really say the scroll wheel had that sort of big picture impact.
Re: (Score:2)
I still have and use mouse pads, mostly for comfort. They're softer and warmer than the underlying desk, and pad the sharp corner.
Re: (Score:2)
I still use mousepads. I got a nice one once that came with a computer. It was hard with a textured surface that was great for optical tracking, no foam to decompose over time, not rectangular or round so it sort of fit my mouse movement pattern, and it didn't slide around on the desk. It works much better than a plan bare desk. It has worn down over time but I have not been able to find any mouse pad since then that competes, instead I see 1990s era cloth+foam crap, or flexible plastic over foam which is
Re: (Score:2)
I came here to say just that.
But then I realized someone else had just said that and I figured I'd burn some karma voting up.
But then I realized I had none left to burn, so I decided to simply "second that" in an appropriately modern fashion with a:
^ THIS
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Dirt Depends (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, scroll wheels: for people who can't use up/down arrows or PgUp/PgDn keys.
The same goes for all the extra buttons. It's somewhat understandable because the original Windows idea was that keyboard commands are hard, and everything should be doable with a mouse. But people still wanted more functionality than the 2-button Microsoft Mouse offered, so we got all that extra crap. I've yet to see the 100-button mouse that completely replaces the keyboard, but we're slowly getting there; PgUp/Dn are mostly g
Re: (Score:2)
And they probably wouldn't have slimmed down the scrollbars if we didn't have scroll wheels on mice.
Maybe a /. survey? (Score:3)
"a couple of extra programmable buttons which seemed unnecessary to me at first, but it soon became an indispensable way to browse the web"
I wonder how many people actually use those extra buttons? Personally, I use the left and right buttons, and the scroll wheel. All the other buttons? Never.
Re: (Score:3)
Try it - you may like it.
Try binding a couple of them (Score:2)
And bind another to cmd-W on the Mac, to close a tab. (Pro Tip: Buy an older Logitech mouse; the newer ones’ page-up and -down buttons are much harder to reach.)
Re: (Score:2)
I do.
In games, it goes without saying, the extra buttons are a godsent. Anything but turn-based games can benefit from extra functions accessed with a thumb button, and even turn based games can sometimes use macros. In the game I play right now, I have macro'd select,left,select,cancel,left, which allows me to upgrade a skill, and move to the next character. In real-time games, I have my mouse set up so that the lower thumb button displays and hides whatever information I want flashing for a second to o
Re: (Score:2)
I can't stand buttons on the side of a mouse. I must be "holding it wrong" because I always end up clicking on them by mistake.
Re: (Score:2)
I did wonder whether the designers were 'tards or I have odd shaped hands. I feel a little better now.
Re: (Score:2)
I use them for games (e.g. the psychic powers in Psychonauts). I occasionally try mapping them to useful things in programs like Photoshop but I always forget what I have them mapped to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"a couple of extra programmable buttons which seemed unnecessary to me at first, but it soon became an indispensable way to browse the web"
I wonder how many people actually use those extra buttons? Personally, I use the left and right buttons, and the scroll wheel. All the other buttons? Never.
One nice thing is that it was programmable per application, which made it especially nice for gaming. It was easier to press with your thumb than to make an extra reach for a keyboard key in FPS games in particular.
Dirty ball ragequit (Score:3)
They changed it DECADES before (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft invented the right mouse button in the mid 80s and it took Apple 3 decades to catch up.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry? I used CAD systems back then that had four buttons on the mouse. Running on unix, off course.
You could get a four-button digitizer for the PC, too, and use it with Autocad. Of course, those actually used RF, they weren't optical at all. They had a crosshair in the middle of a loop embedded in a clear pointer tab so that you could pick precise points from a piece of paper placed on the mousing surface, the idea being that you could translate paper blueprints to the computer rapidly by picking points and then dimensioning. They were really more like a Wacom tablet than anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
Xerox Star had a two button mouse before Apple were founded ...
Much earlier (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems
Re: (Score:2)
An optical mouse that required a specific surface to use may have been accurate, but in terms of being a usable mouse it was many ways inferior to the original ball mouse. It's much the same as putting petrol in a tin box, lighting it on fire, getting a huge explosion and declaring "I made an engine"!
Even the first intelligent was criticised because it didn't work on many surfaces. It was the continuous iterations after this initial development that made it useful and there's a world of difference between d
Re: (Score:2)
-1, uninformative
That is a different kind of mouse that used two orthogonally oriented photo-sensors.
Re: (Score:2)
What was the resolution of those mice? The Sun Hardware FAQ doesn't seem to say. I don't recall it being up around 2400 dpi where fancy modern mice are. There was no reason for it to be, either, since the highest-resolution monitors for their machines of the day were 1280x1024.
Tabs had been invented already. (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of us who remember the era well - the best Browser of the day was Opera. And it had tabs. And they worked.
That other browsers spent years to get up to speed didn't mean that tabs hadn't been invented.
Re: (Score:2)
What's your point? That Sun developed an optical mouse? If Opera developed a tabbed browser that only opened tabbed on Opera approved web pages, they will rightly be passed over in history when another browser allowed you to open tabs on most of the internet.
"20 years ago MS stole patents for mice ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... ripped them off, built them into their own products and didn't give a f*ck because they had enough money to scare Genius and other manufacturers into submission. Because MS has been a real corporate *sshole for most of its existence."
There, FTFY.
Re: (Score:2)
They've had to change. DEC went bankrupt, and could no longer be double-teamed by Microsoft stealing software technologies like VMS to create NT and Intel stealing hardware technologies like the Alpha to create the Pentium.
Logitech (Score:3)
As the timeline goes Sun may have the first optical mouse, but it was useless. Microsoft may have the first optical mouse that was somewhat useful. But personally I credit Logitech with changing the world. Their IR VCSEL technology actually meant the mouse didn't flip out on many surfaces and kicked off a development war to try and get the optical mouse working on *every* surface using everything from lasers to different light beams different detectors etc.
That's who we can credit with truly changing the way we mouse.
Re: (Score:2)
Tabs (Score:2)
(Tabs hadn't been invented yet.)
I used a tabbed browser in the early 90s, on Windows 3.1. It was from GNN, AOL's attempt at an ISP before changing the AOL client to also be a PPT client.
Sun had optical mouse in 80s (Score:2)
Real emacs users use keyboard... (Score:3)
... and map caps-lock to ctrl. Now move aside...
Mouse design was stolen (Score:3)
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/comput... [cnn.com]
The mouse was designed by Goldtouch Technologies. I remember when Microsoft started selling the mouse, and thinking "that design is familiar". This was after Microsoft's successful theft from DEC of VMS kernel designs for Windows NT by hiring David Cutler and his kernel team from DEC in 1988. Microsoft was still committing blatant intellectual property theft without actually buying up the technology competitor, engaging in an "embrace and run away" approach rather than their more developed, less criminal "embrace and extend" philosophy.
Poor castrated mice... (Score:5, Funny)
Samsung take note! (Score:3, Funny)
Even better, the underside of the mouse was completely sealed, preventing even the tiniest speck of dirt from penetrating its insides,
And 10 years prior... (Score:2)
Mouse Systems (Score:2)
My grandfather had a Mouse Systems optical mouse on his PC from the DOS days up until Logitech started shipping consumer PS/2 optical mice. So this was mid-80's through late 90's. It was a pretty reliable piece of kit, though the rudimentary tracking technology was easy to upset. Dust on the (special) mouse pad would disrupt tracking; so would putting too much pressure on the mouse or lifting it slightly.
Environmentally Friendly? (Score:2)
no downside? (Score:2)
But 20 years later, the IntelliMouse Explorer is an upgrade that changed everything without any downside.
No downside? Tell that to the people who made those balls for the mice that were obsoleted by this technology.
Cleaning Mouse Balls was an Entry Level Career (Score:2)
I've been using Mouse Systems opticals since 1989 (Score:3)
Really? This wasn't an MSFT invention at all.
I've been using Mouse Systems optical mice since 1989, among other brands.
Re: (Score:2)
Sometimes I move the mouse and the pointer doesn't respond, so I lift it up and shake it even though I know it's a software delay. It's just a reflex.
Re: (Score:3)
Even with the relative inaccuracies of the optical mice made up for the fact that you didn't have to to in and soil a fingernail or foul up a set of tweezers getting the schmutz off the rollers. Then, you had to make sure you had a good mousepad that was cleaned with rubbing alcohol to ensure that it stayed usable.
Of course, when anyone quit a job at a company, it was considered a normal prank to make off with the mouse balls, or the retainers that twisted in place to hold them in. Very easy to do, and ve