20 Years Ago, Microsoft Changed How We Mouse Forever

20 Years Ago, Microsoft Changed How We Mouse Forever(gizmodo.com)

18 points by ron0c 7 years ago | 10 comments

ken 7 years ago |

I lived through this transition and I truly don’t recall any of the issues with ball mice. They always worked fine for me.

You had to clean out the ball every now and then, but I have to clean off my optical sensor fairly regularly, too.

jjeaff 7 years ago | |

I remember having to clean out the ball thing every few days. And if you waited too long, I needed tweezers to scrape the lint loose. I don't recall ever actually needing to clean the optical sensor on an optical mouse.

pushpop 7 years ago | | |

You shouldn’t need to do it every few days unless your surfaces were particularly grimy. And on those kind of surfaces the slip pads would still need cleaning even on optical mice plus the sensors on the early ones didn’t work too great unless you had clean smooth surfaces anyway. So like for like, ball mice should last 6 months before needing a clean.

pushpop 7 years ago | |

Likewise. I used to be an avid gamer back then and optical mice were terrible for a long time. They were either too light, or batteries needed changing too often (in the case of wireless mice) or they just didn’t work properly on your surface. For a long time I preferred traditional mouse balls over optical mice.

As an aside, anyone else noticed how much better wireless mice were then than they are now? The range on those things used to be so far that I could control my desktop PC from the garden. Now I can’t even have the mouse two meters away from the USB dongle.

jjeaff 7 years ago | | |

That might be due to much more interference in that frequency range from all the many devices you have now vs then.

byteCoder 7 years ago |

Optical mice existed prior to Microsoft's IntelliMouse.

In 1989, I owned an optical mouse (Logitech S9?). The biggest issue was that that mouse required a special gridded mouse pad.

neogodless 7 years ago | |

Certainly true. The article mentions:

> 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.

xkgt 7 years ago |

I don't understand why everyone talks about cleaning the ball, whereas for it was the roller which accumulated dirt every time. Gone are the days when we shuddered to use mouse without a mousepad. A truly welcome change indeed.

rasz 7 years ago |

Oral History of Gary Gordon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxxoWhCzIeU HP engineer, inventor of the sensor.