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.
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 first camera based optical mouse was the Microsoft Intellimouse. They released various types all with the same sensor. These were superb mice for the time, and still good by modern standards. Unlike a lot of competitors (even today) the sensor had pure linear response, no smoothing, no angle snapping, no forced acceleration. It was ideal for gaming. It couldn't cope with very fast movement but it was possible to poll the USB port at a higher frequency which increased the maximum speed before error. 500Hz polling was popular (supported in Linux with the usbhid module's mousepoll option, available with hacked drivers in Windows). The sensor resolution was a somewhat low 400DPI but with the display resolutions people played at back then it wasn't a major issue.
Any problems with erratic movement were caused by excessively shiny surfaces. Preferring ball mice was pure superstition. All the competitive players switched once they realized how much better the optical mice were. I still use an Intellimouse today (with replaced microswitches after the originals wore out).
> Classic IntelliMouse was dead on arrival by the gaming community
I was competitive gamer during that era (played for CS clan The Speakeasy Offensive, or TSO). Only the first release had a sub-par sensor (think 100 dpi?), but everything afterwards dominated traditional trackball mice. By the time my favorite mouse of all time was released in 2002 (Logitech MX500), I don't know of a single serious gamer that wasn't using optical.
> 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).
I remember my first Microsoft "laser" mice, the Intellimouse or something circa 1998. They had a limited blue colored one that I had bought through some kid at college (I was also in college).
I loved it for years - maybe 6, 7 years? Until wireless optical mice were all the rage and Logitech had lured me away.
Now I'm using a wired mice (Razer Naga X) for a little over a year.
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.
The same for the classic Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical. Best mouse ever but they just don't make it anymore. They did resurrect the IntelliMouse briefly recently due to demand, but it has stupid extra side buttons and isn't symmetric. :/
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.
Gamers definitely did know. For a good part of the decade, the basic IntelliMouse Optical (2001 revision) was one of the very few devices that didn't have pointer assistance gimmicks that stand in your way, like angle snapping. It was sought after well into 2010s, despite it being limited to the measly 125Hz polling rate, having high SRAV and slippery sides.
The Microsoft Intellimouse. When I was in school in the '90s, I had to de-gunk mouse rollers almost every time I sat down in a computer lab. A low cost optical mouse for generic surfaces made all that work just evaporate.
(I guess that's not strictly software, since it needs a basic digital camera.)
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
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 have an Microsoft Intellimouse from 2001 that I'm still using as my daily mouse at work.
It works flawlessly, and has all the features I want and nothing more. Mouse wheel with click and detents, back/forward buttons and left/right buttons.
I have a fancier mouse at home with a similar feature set and even though it cost 4x as much, sometimes my work mouse feels better.
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/1999/apr99/eyepr.a...
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.
http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/logitech/p4.shtml
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