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.
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.
But even Wikipedia got it wrong. Sun had optical mice in the 1980's and you could get a version for the PC from Hewlett Packard in 1997 that used an IR sensor.
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.
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.
> Microsoft was far from the first company to incorporate optical tracking into a mouse. The approach dates back as far as 1980 when a pair of inventors came up with two different approaches to tracking mouse movements through imaging.
Of course, the point is that most of us still were not using an optical mouse at that time, and as you pointed out, this new mainstream mouse worked on more common surfaces. So it still changed how we use mice, en masse.
I remember working on a Sun Sparc 4 (I think, about 1996) with an optical mouse that would only work on a special mat, and wondering what was the point? Glad to see they solved that particular problem.
Mouse Systems, Steve Kirsch's company, was shipping optical mice in 1982. They were standard issue on Sun workstations for years. I leave it to your judgment whether that qualifies as "mainstream".
The article/interviewee suggests it was the first mainstream optical mouse, launched in 2000. Didn't the Intellimouse have it around 1999, plus a scrollwheel? I remember using a range of Microsoft mice going back many years and they were pretty well known.
Actually, the Wheel Mouse Optical I still use today is from late-2000, I think. For a while in the middle, I used one of the darker grey Explorers before returning to the lighter and older version.
Anyone else remember round/puck mice from before that Apple one, mid-1990s? First encountered that shape of mouse in a Unix lab.
> The Pro Mouse also ditched the dust-collecting ball underneath a standard mouse in favor of an LED for fully solid-state optical tracking. "As far as I'm aware, we were the first consumer company to do that," Farag said.
Sorry, but no. From wikipedia: "The first modern optical computer mice were the Microsoft IntelliMouse with IntelliEye and IntelliMouse Explorer, introduced in 1999 using technology developed by Hewlett-Packard." Also, the Intellimouse Explorer is a legendary mouse which deserves its own article. I still own two of them and use one daily (3.0 version).
The Mouse Systems optical mice were available for other, consumer, platforms as well. We had a Mouse Systems optical mouse (with the metal grid mousepad) for our Mac Classic in the early 90's.
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.
DEC used three button puck-style mice, the one you saw was likely attached to a DECStation and I think DEC had been using them for quite a while, maybe from the mid to late 80s. Here's logitech's first mouse from 1982 which is also a puck.
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