Since the wheels are magnetically springy, then in theory this mouse should be able to work on a vertical surface, or even upside down, positions in which ball mice really can't function. I wonder if one of the use case scenarios the designer had in mind was potentially NASA using them in space.
yes, one fun way for bored students at my school library to use the computers was to flip the mouse upside down and twiddle the two little wheels like an etch-a-sketch.
I've got the Honeywell version myself and it really is nuts how well it functions on various surfaces. Though I had no idea how far it could actually go, ha! Once again, great work on the research and explanation of how it works.
you two, CRD and LGR are my fave sources for retro nostalgia... both transport me right in front of my IBM, 100MHz Pentium with 8MB RAM. The kicker was the single MB Cirrus Logic card pushing it all along... oh, the days! Endlessly playing Cyberia, Descent, Duke...
LOL add some RGB and you gotta regular 'pro gamer' speed pad for playin the same game they play over and over and over and over and over and over... and then get banned for hacking at it... shit.. now were gonna see teflon mouse pads with RGB... the thought is out in the universe... nvm teflon feet... And now all I can think about is all those birds that fell out of the sky like a hail storm when they guy at the Dupont factory opened the vent shaft... true story.
@@jakedill1304 it wasn't a vent shaft it was a pressure container filled with TFE (tetrafluoroethylene) for experiments to create CFC's and Roy J. Plunkett was the chemist how saw that the pressure had dropped leading to the thought of the gas escaping but as the container was weighed there was no difference so the gas hadn't escaped so he examinated the container and found the withe wax like Teflon (trade name) but yeah testing the propertys of a new material is for sure exciting especially with such a polymer like PTFE
That would have been great for computing on a glass coffee table. Unlike a ball mouse, you don't have to worry if there is water on the surface. Unlike an optical mouse, it should actually work.
As long as it's clean the cheap ball mouse will work and there's laser mouse too 4 all your glass needs thought it most likely came much later. I'm glad my father bought a Microsoft optical mouse in the 90s red and white, it looked amazing and never failed, was a breeze playing games with it and it still looks kinda modern...
@@guily6669I have a lazer mouse, it kinda works on glass, in the sense it traks when it is moved, but it's so not precise, that it's basically unusable without the mouspad
That oiled-plastic test was honestly crazy, I too thought there was no way that would work. Actually the tests remind me a lot of vacuum salesmen, y'all remember those, coming into your home, dropping a bag of dust and then showing off how well the newest models would do? If I'm this impressed by a mechanical mouse in 2021, I can only imagine that any IT or office worker back in the day would've had their mind absolutely blown.
Excellent point about car controls. I work at an automotive museum; we have a car in the collection that we know for a fact no one on earth is capable of driving. It's the only survivor from a 1902 car company that made a whopping three vehicles, and the original owner, a descendant of the company's founder, knew how to use it and did not teach any of his children. It's so obscure we don't even have diagrams or manuals indicating what most of the (unlabelled) controls do.
@@danielch6662 Oh, sure, they could. Only problem is the vehicle was restored in the 70s, by restorators who left no notes. And if the mechanic makes even the slightest mistake dismantling the vehicle or testing it, that's it that's all, it's gone. After a certain point the historic value of learning how it works is overridden by the value of not having to say "ooops, we trashed a priceless historical treasure."
I'm proud to do my part to further typecast CRD as Weird Mouse Dude. I sent him that Honeywell mouse a few weeks ago; I originally found it years ago in a surplus yard, along with some Model Ms. I immediately recognized the Model Ms and snatched them up, but the mouse looked unremarkable until I turned it over and went "whaaa". I had thought about doing a video on it myself over the years, but I'm glad I sent it to CRD as he did a much better job than I ever could have.
My highschool had those honeywell mice! They were really neat, very little cleaning needed, and you never got annoyed because some other student stole the ball from a ball mouse and now you couldn't use the computer. Primary school computers always had missing balls. Hell, I even stole a mouse ball once! They were fun, satisfyingly heavy soft rubber orbs!
and yeah they always had those slightly diagonal tracking issues, even when they were new. But for a library computer, nobody cared. It was a great mouse for that kind of simple office work
@@phxf It's actually neat remembering just how annoying ball mice were, in a cute sort of way. I was the only student in a school of 500+ who had the time to do mouse maintenance where I'd clean the internals and even re-align the pins that other students would bend from carelessly and blindly jamming the PS/2 plug into the back of AT computer towers. Those Honeywell mice sound like a dream for my past-me. :B
I really love that Jack Hawley guy. The picture of him smiling is the ultimate troll, and probably the first individual to successfully use l33t language in a trolling way to xerox. Probably the star of this episode 😅
@@dynamicworlds1 the issue with optical is that the sensor has to be clean enough to see the surface, gunk (or dust) can get in there and just stop it working this mouse doesn't have that issue
I’m surprised this design didn’t come from some NII in Siberia, because it looks robust but janky in an exceptionally Soviet way, like a Lada Niva mouse
If they had a scroll wheel, I'd go looking for one. If it can run on oiled plastic perfectly fine, I bet it would work on fabric bedspreads acceptably.
@@no1DdC well yest but that's becasue theres zero moving parts and an optical mouse just calculates its position based on variations in the surface you're moving your mouse on and doesn't rely on friction to move.
Nowadays, the blue laser optical mice from Microsoft do an excellent job at coping with undesirable mousing surfaces. I've used one on pretty much every surface out there, including pets that wanted to remain in the way, and it just works. The only thing my very early BlueTrack mouse didn't contend with well was clean, clear glass. If the bottom was frosted or it was dirty, it managed, but if it was clean and clear, the pickups just didn't have enough data to work with. These sensors have gotten considerably better over the years, so I suspect the latest generation are actually quite capable even on glass.
Speaking on the AMC inline 6 front, my aunt picked me up from school a really long time ago in a Jeep Cherokee. I noticed the oil light flickering. I told her she needed to pull over since there was no oil in the engine and she said "it's fine it's been doing that for months". That engine is still running 17 years later.
@@UnitSe7en I didn't wanna explain the whole timeline of the engine abuse but I did imply the point. Confirmed via dipstick later it was about 3 quarts low.
My dad did something similar to our 04 explorer once. Poor soul went about 3k with almost no lubricant. It's still kicking without an engine rebuild at 225K miles. Transmission actually gave up first at 190K.
@@UnitSe7en Maybe but that being said that engine lasted for well over 30 years. I owned one made in 1982 and I can tell you that I drove it with absolutely no fluids, (no coolant, oil, trans fluid etc.) for over an hour after destroying the oil pan and much of the under carriage and transmission housing. The oil pan was all but non-existent as I had sheared the bolts right off. The engine was still running when I scrapped the car, still without fluids. Those engines are well known as one of the most durable engines ever made.
Hey, My Father worked for Honeywell in the 90s, I have a rare demo version which does have a clear case with fan like patterns on the top of the "Drums" interesting video to see after all these years :)
back in HS (1996-2000) I had classmates that stole the balls out of the classroom computer mice, making them useless. In schools, that was the downside of ball mice.😐
@@pypes84 a girl with overactive parents got hurt by a mousr ball when i was a kid and they stopped us using the computer lab for quake 3 during lunch break :/
I service CNC controllers and let me tell you I've seen some still working with 3 inches of dust and metal chips covering the whole inside of the electrical enclosure
I used the one of those back in the day, that exact Honeywell model in fact, and I found it had exactly the same sticking issue. It was still better than a gummed up ball mouse, but at the time I definitely preferred a clean ball mouse - especially for small and accurate movement.
Thank you for the confirmation! I absolutely love it when I post one of these videos and someone shows up who has first hand experience, it really pulls things together.
If you find yourself missing the days of cleaning "mouse droppings" out of roller ball mice, try the logitech optical trackball range! All the precision of a lovely trackball, all the satisfaction of cleaning some grot out occasionally, but when it needs cleaning it doesn't start to skip and become unusable, it just gets a bit slow/stiff.
May I suggest (one of) the holy grails of trackballs if you like the logi stuff so much? Kensington expert series. You won't look back at logi again. Thumb and smaller trackballs are behind when it comes to ergo and accuracy of a large ball. I've tried the logi ergo or whatever the latest elevation adjustable one is. It's neat but just not as smooth as the larger stuff sadly. I've owned multiple Logitech mice and nothing holds up like their old MX700, that thing is still working nearly 2 decades later. Their newer stuff though isn't built as well nor does it last me as long, from personal experience. Everyone has different stories. But definitely do check out the Kensington Expert series they are the gold standard for professional trackballs and I see them everywhere in high end entertainment/film/CAD/etc for a reason.
@@stiannobelisto573 Usually dust, which has a high percentage of... dead human skin cells. Even if you cleaned the mouse pad regularly, any time between cleanings was enough to gather some dust.
Funny, I'd never seen one of these before until relatively recently, I saw one of the puck-shaped DEC ones sitting on a shelf in the back room of a computer museum in Pennsylvania a few months ago. It was missing the wheels, the bottom just had two little metal axles sticking out, which made it even more perplexing, but I took a picture so I could look into it when I got home. But even as I was reading about it I was thinking: "there's absolutely going to be a CRD video about this thing at some point."
One of the reasons to use a magnet here is the push force onto the surface, which allows the mouse to grip in these weird conditions. The mouse would be amazing in industrial environments though! But most HMIs for industrial machine use track balls.
@@akkudakkupl Resistive touch screens, if memory serves. The capacitive ones used on smartphones and tablets won't work with gloves unless they include condictive fibres, while the resisitive ones will, and can have extra layers of screen protection added on top without impacting functionality as well.
I genuinely did not expect there to be yet another major instalment to this "weird mice" plot thread in the CRD universe but I am *here* for it. Could there possibly be any more of these?
Only once he manages to get his hands on the mice from the Alto. Some of their attempts to deal with the ball dirtying so quickly was actually to use a slightly rubberized mousepad with a mouse whose trackball was a ball bearing. Just a rather massive stainless steel, chromed ball. The actual mechanism inside was pretty mundane, though, so no real surprises after the material change for the ball.
Hooray for visual aids, I feel engaged! I noticed the advert read "a division of Hawley labs." I wonder what other lost to time wacky adventures he was on.
From the thumbnail, I thought this was going to be the "2 balled mouse" that I dreamed up as a child in the 80s. With 2 balls, you could sense the rotation of the mouse as well as the X, Y movement. I once taped 2 serial mouses together and wrote a demo in Borland Turbo Basic to move a beach ball on the screen and have it rotate when you rotated my well hung Franken-mouse. Good times!
I wonder if you could do that with today's optical mouse technology? Figuring out movement is all done using image processing inside the mouse, so it seems like it might be possible to devise new firmware to look for rotation as well as translation. Potential obstacles: 1. Hardware flexibility. Is the image processing done by an ASIC or a generic microprocessor? If the latter, is it fast enough to do the more complex processing? 2. Needing new USB packets for the rotation information that can be ignored by drivers that don't understand them. 3. Needing new rotation-aware drivers for the OS and ways to pass the rotation information to programs.
When you need a mechanical mouse to go to pride with, but are too afraid your glitter and lubricant covered hands will make it impossible to use your Amiga mid-parade
There was a metal version of this mouse, used in Healthcare and automotive. I had one, and you always used it on a fabric mouse pad, the wheels did have some grip to them. Failure mode was any rotation and replacing the mouse pad every so often. Used it for years until intelimouse was released...
Thanks for uploading this! I found a Honeywell Hawley mouse at a thrift store for $2.00 last month and it ended up being one of my favorite purchases, lol.
We all appreciate the glitter demo sacrifice you made. I remember the problem of mouse balls being stolen at school, optical solved that problem too. Thanks CRD!
I never thought of that... I'm sincerely shocked my high school didn't have mouse ball theft problems in the 90s. And I worked part-time in the print shop/desktop publishing room my senior year. I was the person scraping crud off the rollers, so I would have been the person replacing the balls too. I suspect the kids in my school didn't know, or care enough to discover, that the balls could come out.
16:17 “…in 1971 when the ball mouse was still gaining traction…” you meaning losing traction. The ball mouse was ALWAYS losing traction from the moment you cleaned it.
The amount of times I've rewatched your videos because they're so good and after a long enough time I'll forget most of what the video was about. You must have such good engaging content that I can either watch with 100% attention or just use as background noise when I'm doing shit. You've been my favourite RUclipsr for about six months and I've watched almost every video of yours except for the really old ones.
The tracking thing really kills this thing taking off.... Anyone that relied on their mouse back then to daily drive something like CAD or whatnot no doubt would be looking for something that didn't clog up because of the tracking issues the clogging causes... But after using this thing once would probably describe it as "always clogged". Since the clogging causes more or less exactly the tracking issues this seems to have.
for those sorts of technical drawing applications, vertical and horizontal movement precision is important but ever so slightly diagonal isn't really. When I used this mouse regularly, i noticed the tracking issue, but it never really got in the way.
my dad used one of those for cad and it presumably was fine since he favoured it over anything else, but i do remember it doing the tracking thing so idk, i have a vague memory there was some muscle memory move one automatically did to unstick it or something, but this is deep childhood ephemera so might be misremembering.
yea, only applacation looks like in industrial facilties that might ofton not be so clean and therefore an always slightly clogged but never fulyl clogged mosue was better than one that fulyl clogs but is unclogged off the bat.
In the late 80's me and my friend sold a product called Mouse Wash, a cleaning ball to clean the rollers on ball mice. The ball was acrylic but had a micro textured surface and would grab the gunk on the rollers and it would stick to the acrylic ball, once cleaned you put the original ball back in and you were good to go and the acrylic ball could be cleaned with soap and water.
I can heartily recommend watching that Mother Of All Demos. It's from 1968 and it features: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. 🤯
I know the Honeywell versions of these mouses saw some use for a long time. My school system bought a ton of these, and a few schools in the district used them broadly all the way through the 2000s, and they *still* are present in a handful of science classrooms and labs at least up until everything went remote last year. I haven't been in any of the buildings since, but I can't imagine they'd have swapped them out.
I used to use these in a school computer lab in the early 2000's, and i remember them having the tracking problem. They collected dirt, making the tracking problem worse, but since the dirt was on the outside, it was easier to clean, like you demonstrated.
I disagree with your assessment of the magnet. Precisely because of how small are the forces involved, any drag you cause is terrible. Basically, if you replaced that with a loaded spring it would skip more often, specially in situations where too little (ie: people who used to "mouse glide") or too much force are involved. Edit: seeing the rest of the experiment, you can see why using friction fit (ball mouse's favourite engagement) goes wrong for the planned design of that crazy crazy guy. Conclusion: when everything fails... MAGNETS! :)
In the 90s and early aughts, one of these would have been a significant QoL improvement for me over the ball mice I was using. Even now, if I had one of these available to buy at anything other than collectors-item prices and with USB interface, I'd probably still use my optical as a daily-driver, but I'd keep this thing hooked up, and would use it fairly regularly for stuff that I currently muddle through with constantly having to stop what I'm doing to clean lint out of the optical window.
I switched to IR mice years ago and never looked back. With the cheaper ones you can track strangely while in-air but that doesn't matter when you never have to clean the contact and they work as long as you can physically move the mice. The expensive IR mice use software to negate the weird in-air tracking but I've never actually had issue with it with the high-DPI settings I use.
This would still be great for heavy industry applications and extreme environments If underwater welders ever need to close the support ticket on the spot, this mouse could be adapted and used submerged
Potentiometers don't need to have limits on them, and in-fact many don't. There are also potentiometers that can read more than 360 degrees, like 720 degrees or 900 degrees, and so on. I don't know this for a fact, but I would strongly expect the pots used on the original mouse didn't have limits on them, and simply wrapped around when they reached the end of their sweep.
Another possibility is that the limits of the potentiometers just matched up with the limits of the screen. It's not like they had Doom in those days with its 360 degree rotation. When the mouse cursor hit the edge of the screen, there was no reason it ever needed to go further. It's also easier from the perspective of the programmer to have the hardware give absolute coordinates rather than messing around with deltas and wrapping. It wouldn't have even needed any sort of gearing reduction. With 1 inch diameter wheels and a 720 degree potentiometer, you'd get about 6 inches of movement from left to right or top to bottom, which is in line with the area we use on modern mousepads (remembering that we like to keep the mouse squarely on the pad when we use it and not hanging over the edges, so the area the center of the mouse traverses is only a fraction of the pad). This isn't to say that they couldn't have used potentiometers without limiters, of course, just that it wouldn't be necessary.
It would have been a waste of time if I didn't actually go through with it! The man set a challenge! Now the truth of his claims will be remembered! Thanks for watching, haha
This was a great video. Unfortunately you've inspired me to build my own indestructible mouse like this. I don't need one, but now I want a wireless one I can take everywhere.
I used mine, the Honeywell version, till it just disintegrated....over 20 years...it was...is...the best mouse I ever had. If I could get one new with a spinner in the middle I would buy it today. The angular anomalies you observed don't make any difference. After a day or so I was compensating for them without thinking. No matter where you were it worked. On a wall or any desk it just worked. No mouse pad needed. I used it on a CAD system called Tango for PCB design. The screen would automatically advance the page when you moused into the border of the screen and the mouse could go a far as the cord would allow. Excellent video! Keep up the good work.
there was one of those honeywell mice hanging around my house as a kid, i remember playing with the little feet waiting for stuff to load (pokemon red in an emulator most likely), i think it worked pretty well, hence it still being in use by my dad 1998 or there abouts, right up until optical mice were plentiful if i remember rightly
My much older brother is an architect and the company that he works for used those Honeywell mice on all of their workstations from the late 80s clear up until they were replaced with optical mice around 2000. Apparently they replaced their workstations many times, but kept the old mice because of how reliably they worked. He had one at his house when I was 12 (in 1998) and it blew my little mind how it worked without a ball. I wasn't aware they worked on such ridiculous surfaces though. Definitely an interesting device.
Have your videos always been licensed CC? I just noticed it for the first time in the end card of this one. Not surprised you'd do something like that, but very cool to see :)
Yep! Anyone who's gonna steal em is gonna do it anyway but for anyone whose work can benefit from mine, I want it to be clear that they're free to use it
I've seen these mice. My high school bought a heap of them. When we got a bunch of Win95 machines (1996, I think) they initially came with ball mice. Having learnt from experience with Macintosh machines that kids will steal balls if they can, and the previous policy of locking up the balls and covers no longer being an option with the new machines not being limited to a classroom and being used for specific classes like the macs were, they glued the ball covers on. This did not last long. They quickly went dodgy from picking up gunk, and with the ball cover glued on, the whole thing needed to be dismantled to clean. They were replaced with wheel mice like these within a couple of months and the school stuck with them for at least the remainder of my time there (I finished school in 2000).
When you began talking about magnets, I subscribed. When you pulled out the sheet of VHMWPE, I favorited, committed your name to memory, and began sending this video to friends.
A reverse pedal is exactly the reason why I still have trouble driving and video games within analog controller, that's not how cars work gamers.. that's not how they work..I miss the days when freeform controllers had common support or rebindability in video games and didn't have to use Auto hotkey workarounds... Funny, I can almost peg it right to the release of the Xbox 360 no shit! Suddenly my joystick stopped working in video games.. suddenly there was a picture of an Xbox 360 controller in all games.. suddenly you couldn't button map it in all video games.. not all but most, now at least we have injector workarounds LOL and retro gaming is such a thing that there are things to make things work.. but for someone not in the technical know-how back in the old days, dark fucking times dark fucking times.. Seriously though, who the fuck came up with the idea that you should use two different triggers for the gas pedal? The more I think about it the more I want that analog keyboard so bad, the good one from that company that's always has them sold out cuz I'll be damned if I give razor any of my money, and all the other ones are a waste of optical, just having shorter key presses or customizable key presses rather than actual analog control which is like the whole fucking point! It's the only improvement that we've had on keyboard since going way back in the day when keyboard used to give you extra keys before they figured out like you could be less keys for more money.. I still have my g15 I will always have my g15 and I have another g15 I found it a Goodwill that works just fine, and a mother fuckin Trace pencil to fix it whenever it fucks up.
I actually had a mechanical rotary encoder in one of my serial mice for PC. Sadly don't think I have that one anymore, but I think it was a knockoff of the Microsoft Mouse 2.0
I’ve used the DEC version - the hockey puck version of this kind of mouse - in a college computer lab in the early 90s. That was the *only* time I ever saw one. I suspect that one of the reasons this mouse style wasn’t more popular was because they didn’t actually try and sell it to consumers. I only ever saw them on those DECstations, and your example is from Honeywell - another big tech company. It sounds like Hawley maybe licensed it to those big companies, and never figured out how to get it into a consumer mouse a random person could buy? I dunno. I remember thinking they were weird, but the thing I liked least was the completely round shape of the mouse, not the weird sensors. The same lab had Sun workstations with the optical mice with the shiny metal mouse “pads” under them, but they both worked fine, as near as I can remember.
3:02 I like the visual demo you have of how the wheels move of a traditional ball mouse, essentially. It made it so clear when you moved your two-wheel demo rollers at different angles.
You missed a great chance to try an optical mouse on that surface. At least some optical mice wouldn't work there either. Recently encountered a Apple mouse spec'd in a situation with a white laminate counter, did not work at all.
I thought about that after the fact, but honestly what I decided to do was to post the video, wait for people to make suggestions about what else to test, and then I'll follow up with a short where I just quickly go through some other experiments
@@Kae6502 It will work fine, albeit perhaps with some stuttering, but mostly should be fine. Don't predict a problem. Not really an entertaining demo imo.
I miss going around my mom's office after school cleaning out all of the mice that weren't currently being used. I think it was more 'helpful' than helpful as this was the 90s, but it made kid me happy.
A person needs to have a particular experience set to understand the "built like an AMC inline six" reference, but for those of us who have had that sort of experience set [My first car was a 1965 Rambler Classic 660 station wagon with one of AMC's indestructible 232 cubic inch inline sixes.] the reference is guaranteed to bring a whopping great grin to our faces. Thank you. You made my week.
So glad I found your channel today dude!! Love your content and how you do your videos. I can easily watch every second of your videos not only because I’m very interested in everything you do videos about, but you do it in a way that keeps my attention. Keep it up I’m here for it!
My elementary school actually had a few of the Keytronic versions of these mice on the old computers they had. I'm remember pushing the Keytronic button in a lot when using it wondering what it was for.
I had the Key Tronic mouse for my Amiga 4000T back in the day. It was a rock-solid device. The pads, when new, are a bit more grippy, but with age, lose that and cause the tracking to fall off a cliff. The Key Tronic one I could get new feet for until around 2006. A really bulletproof design.
Haha. I love how you created a whole narrative based on one picture of the dude. It would be funny if it was from a costume party or something. The turnaround after the test was a nice mea culpa. Anyway, thanks man, interesting shit as ever.
I'm so glad I found this channel. You sir, are an A-class nerd. I thought my own collection of old hardware was weird, but you definitely won the mouse round. I can't wait to find out what else you have in store!
Back in college (well over 20 years ago) we had DECStations with those hockey puck mice. We also had Sun Stations with the optical mice, and RISC stations with ball mice. I found the DEC Station hockey puck to be kind of an awkard shape and indeed it had tracking problems. I wasn't a fan. I remember interpreting those tracking problems as being dirty and looking under the mouse ... and having no bloody idea how to clean it :) Of the three, I tended to like the ball the best, despite sometimes having to clean them. The opticals weren't always so great, and sometimes the reflective pads that were required to use with them would "walk off" and render them completely useless.
Going into this video I thought it was going to be a mouse that interfaces with unexpected hardware. I had imagined you plugging it into a literal toaster and somehow being able to execute some functions. I got to the end of the video before I realized this video is not about what I thought it would be about. 10/10, would watch again.
I had an optical mouse back around 1984 or 85. I had an Apple IIc, and when I bought it, I also bought a copy of Bank Street Writer, which included an optical mouse and a metal mousepad with greenish grid lines on it. As I recall, the horizontal lines were a slightly darker shade of green that the vertical ones, though it could have been the other way around. I used that IIc all through High School. When I switched to a PC (Tandy 100TX) for college, I gave it to my dad for his company accountant to use, where they used it for many, many years. I really missed that mouse though, because it was so smooth, and always worked, unlike the ball mice that PC's used. When the first Microsoft IntelliMouse with IntelliEye came out in 1999, I snatched one up.
Apple did make a big contribution to computer mouse design. Initially they were building prototypes with a steel ball and rollers covered with a rubbery material named Poron. Problem was either the steel ball would slide and skip on the surface, or the rollers would get dirty and slip, or get flat spots. Then someone had the brilliant idea to reverse it. Coat the ball with the rubbery material and make the rollers bare steel. Ding! Must have been quite the engineering process to figure out how to evenly coat and heavy steel ball. I do recall seeing several non-Apple mice with a few tiny holes through the ball coating. I assume made by tiny pins in the coating mold to hold the ball centered. There are a lot of mouse balls without such features. A walk down manufacturing memory lane on how mouse balls were made would be interesting.
The Honeywell mouse wheel color was always that shade of off yellow. I always thought it was made out of some more grippy version of plastic. We still use ball mice everyday right now where I work because our lab desks are pure white, shiny, super clean laminate and optical mice have nothing to take pictures off to know there are moving. I knw the one I am using was made in 2003 and it's still working just fine.
The major thing I remember about the old ball mice is that they became "alcoholics" if you cleaned them too often. You cleaned the ball and other internals with alcohol, but the more often you did this, the faster they got dirtied up again because dust etc. stuck more easily. Eventually, the mouse had to be declared "alcoholic", and you got a new one.
One of the computer labs at my high school (in the late 90s/early 00s) was kitted out with these roller mice. I think the later version shown, at the end of the video, because I remember removing and reattaching the mouse buttons, as a fidget. I don't remember exactly where they were used, it's been a while, but I _think_ it was the computer lab in the woodshop, where they thought technical drawing, CAD, etc. So it would make sense to use a mouse that was less susceptible to dirt, that building had a thin layer of sawdust on every surface. But also, kids are filth beasts and the ball mice in the other lab were always getting clogged. Anyways, I don't remember them being particularly different from the ball mice in terms of tracking or whatnot, but it was a long time ago, so I probably wouldn't remember a detail like that even if it did. They worked well enough for school purposes, and the resilience was a major upside.
I also remember how goshawful the early consumer optical mice were. Horribly twitchy on any surface. Logitech initially solved it by releasing a dual laser version of their Mouseman, and later versions had better lasers that fixed the issue entirely. Also, CRC Electronic Cleaner cuts oil and grease like nothing else. Spray that on there and all that oil will run off like water.
I remember those! I worked at a college in the mid 80’s and we where constantly losing mouse balls (because the students would remove them). When we discovered the Honeywell mice we immediately switched to them. No more missing balls! By the way Honeywell sold those mice explicitly for industrial environments where a ball mouse would soon fail. They also had a keyboard there was completely sealed and could be also be used in hostile environments. We also replaced the student keyboards with those as well.
I'm gonna need the exact brand and color code you used for that wall. Every time I come here I'm reminded how good a color that is, and I'd love at-least an accent wall of it.
Absolutely incredible design and throughout the video I became progressively more enamored with it, now I absolutely need to have one for my vintage computer collection. I'm about to throw away a bunch of ball mice!
The Alto was never shipped anywhere other than internally at Xerox, and some reports say a few universities as well. It was never a commercial product.
Since the wheels are magnetically springy, then in theory this mouse should be able to work on a vertical surface, or even upside down, positions in which ball mice really can't function. I wonder if one of the use case scenarios the designer had in mind was potentially NASA using them in space.
Holy crap you're right
@@CathodeRayDude NASA though simply relies now on Lenovo Thinkpads, with both the nub and a touchpad to use for the pointer. No mice at all.
@@SeanBZA weight rules space (when you're living in a gravity well)
Now we need the ultimate test: Will it work upside down on oiled teflon?
yes, one fun way for bored students at my school library to use the computers was to flip the mouse upside down and twiddle the two little wheels like an etch-a-sketch.
I've got the Honeywell version myself and it really is nuts how well it functions on various surfaces. Though I had no idea how far it could actually go, ha!
Once again, great work on the research and explanation of how it works.
I thought I was cool for finding a Logitech ball mouse at CR packaged with Windows 3.0 on 5 1/4 floppies.
LGR PERIPHERAL HYPE
Does it have the same issues as in this video?
Do you have the same tracking issue?
you two, CRD and LGR are my fave sources for retro nostalgia... both transport me right in front of my IBM, 100MHz Pentium with 8MB RAM. The kicker was the single MB Cirrus Logic card pushing it all along... oh, the days! Endlessly playing Cyberia, Descent, Duke...
Finally, I can use oiled Teflon as a mouse pad! Livin' the dream.
LOL add some RGB and you gotta regular 'pro gamer' speed pad for playin the same game they play over and over and over and over and over and over... and then get banned for hacking at it... shit.. now were gonna see teflon mouse pads with RGB... the thought is out in the universe... nvm teflon feet...
And now all I can think about is all those birds that fell out of the sky like a hail storm when they guy at the Dupont factory opened the vent shaft... true story.
@@jakedill1304 it wasn't a vent shaft it was a pressure container filled with TFE (tetrafluoroethylene) for experiments to create CFC's and Roy J. Plunkett was the chemist how saw that the pressure had dropped leading to the thought of the gas escaping but as the container was weighed there was no difference so the gas hadn't escaped so he examinated the container and found the withe wax like Teflon (trade name) but yeah testing the propertys of a new material is for sure exciting especially with such a polymer like PTFE
@@jakedill1304 hey we have the same color!
That would have been great for computing on a glass coffee table. Unlike a ball mouse, you don't have to worry if there is water on the surface. Unlike an optical mouse, it should actually work.
As long as it's clean the cheap ball mouse will work and there's laser mouse too 4 all your glass needs thought it most likely came much later.
I'm glad my father bought a Microsoft optical mouse in the 90s red and white, it looked amazing and never failed, was a breeze playing games with it and it still looks kinda modern...
ruclips.net/video/Ed1mXV9hNl8/видео.html this is the proof of concept that I was talking about.
@@guily6669 that has to be the intellimouse which they still make today
@@guily6669I have a lazer mouse, it kinda works on glass, in the sense it traks when it is moved, but it's so not precise, that it's basically unusable without the mouspad
That oiled-plastic test was honestly crazy, I too thought there was no way that would work. Actually the tests remind me a lot of vacuum salesmen, y'all remember those, coming into your home, dropping a bag of dust and then showing off how well the newest models would do? If I'm this impressed by a mechanical mouse in 2021, I can only imagine that any IT or office worker back in the day would've had their mind absolutely blown.
Excellent point about car controls. I work at an automotive museum; we have a car in the collection that we know for a fact no one on earth is capable of driving. It's the only survivor from a 1902 car company that made a whopping three vehicles, and the original owner, a descendant of the company's founder, knew how to use it and did not teach any of his children. It's so obscure we don't even have diagrams or manuals indicating what most of the (unlabelled) controls do.
I bet Jay Leno could drive it
I would be very curious to see this vehicle. Would you mind sharing the make/model? (assuming pictures of it even exist online)
@@iminthatweirdpartofyoutube2687 It's a 1903 Redpath Messenger. Not many good photos out there.
Surely a mechanic could examine the controls, follow their linkages, and figure out what they do.
@@danielch6662 Oh, sure, they could. Only problem is the vehicle was restored in the 70s, by restorators who left no notes. And if the mechanic makes even the slightest mistake dismantling the vehicle or testing it, that's it that's all, it's gone. After a certain point the historic value of learning how it works is overridden by the value of not having to say "ooops, we trashed a priceless historical treasure."
CRD: Oh god
CRD: Jack Hawley is invincible
CRD: we can't stop him
Jack Hawley: Jack Hawley
"had he done it in 1971, when the ball-mouse was still *gaining traction* "... i see what you did there...
jens, you beat me to it! lol!
I'm proud to do my part to further typecast CRD as Weird Mouse Dude. I sent him that Honeywell mouse a few weeks ago; I originally found it years ago in a surplus yard, along with some Model Ms. I immediately recognized the Model Ms and snatched them up, but the mouse looked unremarkable until I turned it over and went "whaaa". I had thought about doing a video on it myself over the years, but I'm glad I sent it to CRD as he did a much better job than I ever could have.
Oh man. In college, we lusted after that mouse, but they were priced just out of reach. We all used the DEC puck version, and loved how they worked.
Thank you for this great contribution.
Legend
Definitely a legend
100% sure this man could club someone to death with his massive pen-is. Love the channel.
My highschool had those honeywell mice! They were really neat, very little cleaning needed, and you never got annoyed because some other student stole the ball from a ball mouse and now you couldn't use the computer. Primary school computers always had missing balls. Hell, I even stole a mouse ball once! They were fun, satisfyingly heavy soft rubber orbs!
and yeah they always had those slightly diagonal tracking issues, even when they were new. But for a library computer, nobody cared. It was a great mouse for that kind of simple office work
@@phxf It's actually neat remembering just how annoying ball mice were, in a cute sort of way. I was the only student in a school of 500+ who had the time to do mouse maintenance where I'd clean the internals and even re-align the pins that other students would bend from carelessly and blindly jamming the PS/2 plug into the back of AT computer towers. Those Honeywell mice sound like a dream for my past-me. :B
My inner primary school student got a laugh out of the term "missing balls".
@@darthmeow1370 I have testicual cancer found it funny as shit
I really love that Jack Hawley guy. The picture of him smiling is the ultimate troll, and probably the first individual to successfully use l33t language in a trolling way to xerox. Probably the star of this episode 😅
Definitely a huckster.
As a service technician, I switched to the Honeywell wheel mouse and never looked back.
@@phxf laugh out loud
When I got rid of my last ball mouse I took a sledge hammer to it and turned it into powder, my god I hate ball mice.
As opposed to optical?
@@dynamicworlds1 the issue with optical is that the sensor has to be clean enough to see the surface, gunk (or dust) can get in there and just stop it working this mouse doesn't have that issue
@@AstoundingAmelia also optical mice get tripped out by things like wood grain, dirt, grime, all that and wont track right.
I’m surprised this design didn’t come from some NII in Siberia, because it looks robust but janky in an exceptionally Soviet way, like a Lada Niva mouse
Yeah, this is the Lada of mice.
Robust, won't break, always works, _but only just._
Ah yes, the niva, the only car that breaks down easier if you drive it on the road instead of offroad.
Love my Lada 2101 and can definitely see the comparison
@@rockytom5889 The trick is to drive it at the same speed on the road as you would offroad.
If they had a scroll wheel, I'd go looking for one. If it can run on oiled plastic perfectly fine, I bet it would work on fabric bedspreads acceptably.
maybe not, it has to slip and grip at the same time, but idk
I've found that Microsoft's small optical mice (including that insane folding one) work exceptionally well on bedspreads.
@@no1DdC well yest but that's becasue theres zero moving parts and an optical mouse just calculates its position based on variations in the surface you're moving your mouse on and doesn't rely on friction to move.
Nowadays, the blue laser optical mice from Microsoft do an excellent job at coping with undesirable mousing surfaces. I've used one on pretty much every surface out there, including pets that wanted to remain in the way, and it just works. The only thing my very early BlueTrack mouse didn't contend with well was clean, clear glass. If the bottom was frosted or it was dirty, it managed, but if it was clean and clear, the pickups just didn't have enough data to work with. These sensors have gotten considerably better over the years, so I suspect the latest generation are actually quite capable even on glass.
@@victornpb My thoughts too. It will need a fairly stiff flat surface whatever it's made of.
Speaking on the AMC inline 6 front, my aunt picked me up from school a really long time ago in a Jeep Cherokee. I noticed the oil light flickering.
I told her she needed to pull over since there was no oil in the engine and she said "it's fine it's been doing that for months".
That engine is still running 17 years later.
Running without oil is not the same thing as the oil sensor being faulty.
What you have done here is fallen for a fallacy.
@@UnitSe7en I didn't wanna explain the whole timeline of the engine abuse but I did imply the point.
Confirmed via dipstick later it was about 3 quarts low.
@@kloroformd that's still 2 quarts of fine lubricant
My dad did something similar to our 04 explorer once. Poor soul went about 3k with almost no lubricant. It's still kicking without an engine rebuild at 225K miles. Transmission actually gave up first at 190K.
@@UnitSe7en Maybe but that being said that engine lasted for well over 30 years. I owned one made in 1982 and I can tell you that I drove it with absolutely no fluids, (no coolant, oil, trans fluid etc.) for over an hour after destroying the oil pan and much of the under carriage and transmission housing. The oil pan was all but non-existent as I had sheared the bolts right off. The engine was still running when I scrapped the car, still without fluids. Those engines are well known as one of the most durable engines ever made.
Hey, My Father worked for Honeywell in the 90s, I have a rare demo version which does have a clear case with fan like patterns on the top of the "Drums"
interesting video to see after all these years :)
oh that's TERRIFIC!
back in HS (1996-2000) I had classmates that stole the balls out of the classroom computer mice, making them useless. In schools, that was the downside of ball mice.😐
Ours all had the cover glued shut to prevent this. I'm guessing they died quicker from stolen balls than they did from lack of cleaning.
Hell yeah, you could then chuck them at classmates. They hurt but didn't do much damage as they were rubber covered.
I was one of those kids
@@pypes84 a girl with overactive parents got hurt by a mousr ball when i was a kid and they stopped us using the computer lab for quake 3 during lunch break :/
IT WORKS ON ANYTHING
I service CNC controllers and let me tell you I've seen some still working with 3 inches of dust and metal chips covering the whole inside of the electrical enclosure
I used the one of those back in the day, that exact Honeywell model in fact, and I found it had exactly the same sticking issue.
It was still better than a gummed up ball mouse, but at the time I definitely preferred a clean ball mouse - especially for small and accurate movement.
Thank you for the confirmation! I absolutely love it when I post one of these videos and someone shows up who has first hand experience, it really pulls things together.
If you find yourself missing the days of cleaning "mouse droppings" out of roller ball mice, try the logitech optical trackball range! All the precision of a lovely trackball, all the satisfaction of cleaning some grot out occasionally, but when it needs cleaning it doesn't start to skip and become unusable, it just gets a bit slow/stiff.
May I suggest (one of) the holy grails of trackballs if you like the logi stuff so much?
Kensington expert series. You won't look back at logi again. Thumb and smaller trackballs are behind when it comes to ergo and accuracy of a large ball. I've tried the logi ergo or whatever the latest elevation adjustable one is. It's neat but just not as smooth as the larger stuff sadly.
I've owned multiple Logitech mice and nothing holds up like their old MX700, that thing is still working nearly 2 decades later. Their newer stuff though isn't built as well nor does it last me as long, from personal experience. Everyone has different stories. But definitely do check out the Kensington Expert series they are the gold standard for professional trackballs and I see them everywhere in high end entertainment/film/CAD/etc for a reason.
I always wondered what all that "dirt" was? I mean was mouse pads really that dirty..
@@stiannobelisto573 Usually dust, which has a high percentage of... dead human skin cells. Even if you cleaned the mouse pad regularly, any time between cleanings was enough to gather some dust.
@@stiannobelisto573 dead skin cells and hand oil mostly
Funny, I'd never seen one of these before until relatively recently, I saw one of the puck-shaped DEC ones sitting on a shelf in the back room of a computer museum in Pennsylvania a few months ago. It was missing the wheels, the bottom just had two little metal axles sticking out, which made it even more perplexing, but I took a picture so I could look into it when I got home. But even as I was reading about it I was thinking: "there's absolutely going to be a CRD video about this thing at some point."
when u showed the mouse has 2 feet i was waiting for a 2 of them :(
I SCREWED UP
One of the reasons to use a magnet here is the push force onto the surface, which allows the mouse to grip in these weird conditions.
The mouse would be amazing in industrial environments though! But most HMIs for industrial machine use track balls.
Man, imagine the magnets sucking up all the filings and chips and stuff in such a place, though.
That is easy to fix, just add some metal to shield the magnetic field
Or they are touch screens. Or are dumb HMIs with dome function buttons. But track balls are popular in older settings.
@@akkudakkupl Resistive touch screens, if memory serves. The capacitive ones used on smartphones and tablets won't work with gloves unless they include condictive fibres, while the resisitive ones will, and can have extra layers of screen protection added on top without impacting functionality as well.
@@Roxor128 exactly.
I genuinely did not expect there to be yet another major instalment to this "weird mice" plot thread in the CRD universe but I am *here* for it.
Could there possibly be any more of these?
Only once he manages to get his hands on the mice from the Alto. Some of their attempts to deal with the ball dirtying so quickly was actually to use a slightly rubberized mousepad with a mouse whose trackball was a ball bearing. Just a rather massive stainless steel, chromed ball. The actual mechanism inside was pretty mundane, though, so no real surprises after the material change for the ball.
Hooray for visual aids, I feel engaged!
I noticed the advert read "a division of Hawley labs." I wonder what other lost to time wacky adventures he was on.
I show the Mother Of All Demos to all the junior programmers I mentor to inspire them to get their brain juices flowing.
From the thumbnail, I thought this was going to be the "2 balled mouse" that I dreamed up as a child in the 80s. With 2 balls, you could sense the rotation of the mouse as well as the X, Y movement. I once taped 2 serial mouses together and wrote a demo in Borland Turbo Basic to move a beach ball on the screen and have it rotate when you rotated my well hung Franken-mouse. Good times!
I wonder if you could do that with today's optical mouse technology? Figuring out movement is all done using image processing inside the mouse, so it seems like it might be possible to devise new firmware to look for rotation as well as translation.
Potential obstacles:
1. Hardware flexibility. Is the image processing done by an ASIC or a generic microprocessor? If the latter, is it fast enough to do the more complex processing?
2. Needing new USB packets for the rotation information that can be ignored by drivers that don't understand them.
3. Needing new rotation-aware drivers for the OS and ways to pass the rotation information to programs.
Imagining the PC cursor rotate like the wii remote pointer looks extremely cursed in my head
When you need a mechanical mouse to go to pride with, but are too afraid your glitter and lubricant covered hands will make it impossible to use your Amiga mid-parade
There was a metal version of this mouse, used in Healthcare and automotive. I had one, and you always used it on a fabric mouse pad, the wheels did have some grip to them. Failure mode was any rotation and replacing the mouse pad every so often. Used it for years until intelimouse was released...
Thanks for uploading this! I found a Honeywell Hawley mouse at a thrift store for $2.00 last month and it ended up being one of my favorite purchases, lol.
We all appreciate the glitter demo sacrifice you made. I remember the problem of mouse balls being stolen at school, optical solved that problem too. Thanks CRD!
I never thought of that... I'm sincerely shocked my high school didn't have mouse ball theft problems in the 90s. And I worked part-time in the print shop/desktop publishing room my senior year. I was the person scraping crud off the rollers, so I would have been the person replacing the balls too. I suspect the kids in my school didn't know, or care enough to discover, that the balls could come out.
What were they doing with them after stealing them?
@@dynamicworlds1 Mostly nothing, kids just being vandals.
16:17 “…in 1971 when the ball mouse was still gaining traction…” you meaning losing traction. The ball mouse was ALWAYS losing traction from the moment you cleaned it.
The amount of times I've rewatched your videos because they're so good and after a long enough time I'll forget most of what the video was about. You must have such good engaging content that I can either watch with 100% attention or just use as background noise when I'm doing shit. You've been my favourite RUclipsr for about six months and I've watched almost every video of yours except for the really old ones.
Thank you so much -_-
The tracking thing really kills this thing taking off.... Anyone that relied on their mouse back then to daily drive something like CAD or whatnot no doubt would be looking for something that didn't clog up because of the tracking issues the clogging causes... But after using this thing once would probably describe it as "always clogged". Since the clogging causes more or less exactly the tracking issues this seems to have.
for those sorts of technical drawing applications, vertical and horizontal movement precision is important but ever so slightly diagonal isn't really. When I used this mouse regularly, i noticed the tracking issue, but it never really got in the way.
my dad used one of those for cad and it presumably was fine since he favoured it over anything else, but i do remember it doing the tracking thing so idk, i have a vague memory there was some muscle memory move one automatically did to unstick it or something, but this is deep childhood ephemera so might be misremembering.
yea, only applacation looks like in industrial facilties that might ofton not be so clean and therefore an always slightly clogged but never fulyl clogged mosue was better than one that fulyl clogs but is unclogged off the bat.
In the late 80's me and my friend sold a product called Mouse Wash, a cleaning ball to clean the rollers on ball mice. The ball was acrylic but had a micro textured surface and would grab the gunk on the rollers and it would stick to the acrylic ball, once cleaned you put the original ball back in and you were good to go and the acrylic ball could be cleaned with soap and water.
I would have loved to have that back in the day!
Today we explore the downfalls of shooting a script out of chronological order.
I can heartily recommend watching that Mother Of All Demos. It's from 1968 and it features: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. 🤯
I know the Honeywell versions of these mouses saw some use for a long time. My school system bought a ton of these, and a few schools in the district used them broadly all the way through the 2000s, and they *still* are present in a handful of science classrooms and labs at least up until everything went remote last year. I haven't been in any of the buildings since, but I can't imagine they'd have swapped them out.
I used to use these in a school computer lab in the early 2000's, and i remember them having the tracking problem. They collected dirt, making the tracking problem worse, but since the dirt was on the outside, it was easier to clean, like you demonstrated.
I disagree with your assessment of the magnet. Precisely because of how small are the forces involved, any drag you cause is terrible. Basically, if you replaced that with a loaded spring it would skip more often, specially in situations where too little (ie: people who used to "mouse glide") or too much force are involved.
Edit: seeing the rest of the experiment, you can see why using friction fit (ball mouse's favourite engagement) goes wrong for the planned design of that crazy crazy guy.
Conclusion: when everything fails... MAGNETS! :)
"its a mouse, and it [mouses]" That was a great line.
I rarely actually laugh aloud watching a video... success.
In the 90s and early aughts, one of these would have been a significant QoL improvement for me over the ball mice I was using. Even now, if I had one of these available to buy at anything other than collectors-item prices and with USB interface, I'd probably still use my optical as a daily-driver, but I'd keep this thing hooked up, and would use it fairly regularly for stuff that I currently muddle through with constantly having to stop what I'm doing to clean lint out of the optical window.
I switched to IR mice years ago and never looked back. With the cheaper ones you can track strangely while in-air but that doesn't matter when you never have to clean the contact and they work as long as you can physically move the mice. The expensive IR mice use software to negate the weird in-air tracking but I've never actually had issue with it with the high-DPI settings I use.
@@sf4137 Mine is IR. It still gets flaky an unresponsive if there's a speck of fiber-fil in the window, or if the lens gets a grease smudge
This would still be great for heavy industry applications and extreme environments
If underwater welders ever need to close the support ticket on the spot, this mouse could be adapted and used submerged
Potentiometers don't need to have limits on them, and in-fact many don't. There are also potentiometers that can read more than 360 degrees, like 720 degrees or 900 degrees, and so on.
I don't know this for a fact, but I would strongly expect the pots used on the original mouse didn't have limits on them, and simply wrapped around when they reached the end of their sweep.
Another possibility is that the limits of the potentiometers just matched up with the limits of the screen. It's not like they had Doom in those days with its 360 degree rotation. When the mouse cursor hit the edge of the screen, there was no reason it ever needed to go further. It's also easier from the perspective of the programmer to have the hardware give absolute coordinates rather than messing around with deltas and wrapping.
It wouldn't have even needed any sort of gearing reduction. With 1 inch diameter wheels and a 720 degree potentiometer, you'd get about 6 inches of movement from left to right or top to bottom, which is in line with the area we use on modern mousepads (remembering that we like to keep the mouse squarely on the pad when we use it and not hanging over the edges, so the area the center of the mouse traverses is only a fraction of the pad).
This isn't to say that they couldn't have used potentiometers without limiters, of course, just that it wouldn't be necessary.
Hey man, I only discovered your channel a few months ago, but holy shit you do good work. Fantastic content.
This is really nice and I was so glad to start supporting you on Patreon :)
Hello new patreon friend, it's good isn't it? I signed up super recently myself
When you actually tested the oiled Teflon claim I lost it 🤣
Your videos rock man I love this stuff!
It would have been a waste of time if I didn't actually go through with it! The man set a challenge! Now the truth of his claims will be remembered! Thanks for watching, haha
Just found you. Surprisingly. You've now been slotted in between 8bit guy, techmoan, technology connections, and retro recipes.
Hell yeah.
This was a great video.
Unfortunately you've inspired me to build my own indestructible mouse like this.
I don't need one, but now I want a wireless one I can take everywhere.
I used mine, the Honeywell version, till it just disintegrated....over 20 years...it was...is...the best mouse I ever had. If I could get one new with a spinner in the middle I would buy it today.
The angular anomalies you observed don't make any difference. After a day or so I was compensating for them without thinking. No matter where you were it worked. On a wall or any desk it just worked. No mouse pad needed. I used it on a CAD system called Tango for PCB design. The screen would automatically advance the page when you moused into the border of the screen and the mouse could go a far as the cord would allow.
Excellent video! Keep up the good work.
This is such an awesome channel
This is the first time I’ve watched some of your videos, went to your Chanel to find another and realised I’ve been watching your shorts for ages
there was one of those honeywell mice hanging around my house as a kid, i remember playing with the little feet waiting for stuff to load (pokemon red in an emulator most likely), i think it worked pretty well, hence it still being in use by my dad 1998 or there abouts, right up until optical mice were plentiful if i remember rightly
My much older brother is an architect and the company that he works for used those Honeywell mice on all of their workstations from the late 80s clear up until they were replaced with optical mice around 2000. Apparently they replaced their workstations many times, but kept the old mice because of how reliably they worked. He had one at his house when I was 12 (in 1998) and it blew my little mind how it worked without a ball. I wasn't aware they worked on such ridiculous surfaces though. Definitely an interesting device.
24:40 It's static vs dynamic friction. It takes more force to get something moving initially than it does to keep it moving.
Have your videos always been licensed CC? I just noticed it for the first time in the end card of this one. Not surprised you'd do something like that, but very cool to see :)
Yep! Anyone who's gonna steal em is gonna do it anyway but for anyone whose work can benefit from mine, I want it to be clear that they're free to use it
I've seen these mice. My high school bought a heap of them.
When we got a bunch of Win95 machines (1996, I think) they initially came with ball mice. Having learnt from experience with Macintosh machines that kids will steal balls if they can, and the previous policy of locking up the balls and covers no longer being an option with the new machines not being limited to a classroom and being used for specific classes like the macs were, they glued the ball covers on. This did not last long.
They quickly went dodgy from picking up gunk, and with the ball cover glued on, the whole thing needed to be dismantled to clean. They were replaced with wheel mice like these within a couple of months and the school stuck with them for at least the remainder of my time there (I finished school in 2000).
Wow, that's an angle I hadn't thought of. If they had marketed the things to school computer labs ...
When you began talking about magnets, I subscribed. When you pulled out the sheet of VHMWPE, I favorited, committed your name to memory, and began sending this video to friends.
A reverse pedal is exactly the reason why I still have trouble driving and video games within analog controller, that's not how cars work gamers.. that's not how they work..I miss the days when freeform controllers had common support or rebindability in video games and didn't have to use Auto hotkey workarounds... Funny, I can almost peg it right to the release of the Xbox 360 no shit! Suddenly my joystick stopped working in video games.. suddenly there was a picture of an Xbox 360 controller in all games.. suddenly you couldn't button map it in all video games.. not all but most, now at least we have injector workarounds LOL and retro gaming is such a thing that there are things to make things work.. but for someone not in the technical know-how back in the old days, dark fucking times dark fucking times..
Seriously though, who the fuck came up with the idea that you should use two different triggers for the gas pedal? The more I think about it the more I want that analog keyboard so bad, the good one from that company that's always has them sold out cuz I'll be damned if I give razor any of my money, and all the other ones are a waste of optical, just having shorter key presses or customizable key presses rather than actual analog control which is like the whole fucking point! It's the only improvement that we've had on keyboard since going way back in the day when keyboard used to give you extra keys before they figured out like you could be less keys for more money.. I still have my g15 I will always have my g15 and I have another g15 I found it a Goodwill that works just fine, and a mother fuckin Trace pencil to fix it whenever it fucks up.
Always stoked to see Doug Engelbart content.
the mother of all demos blew my mind the first time i watched it! engelbart and everyone involved in making that demo happen did an incredible job
I actually had a mechanical rotary encoder in one of my serial mice for PC. Sadly don't think I have that one anymore, but I think it was a knockoff of the Microsoft Mouse 2.0
16:17 "when the ball mouse was gaining TRACTION" well done, sir.
I’ve used the DEC version - the hockey puck version of this kind of mouse - in a college computer lab in the early 90s. That was the *only* time I ever saw one. I suspect that one of the reasons this mouse style wasn’t more popular was because they didn’t actually try and sell it to consumers. I only ever saw them on those DECstations, and your example is from Honeywell - another big tech company. It sounds like Hawley maybe licensed it to those big companies, and never figured out how to get it into a consumer mouse a random person could buy?
I dunno.
I remember thinking they were weird, but the thing I liked least was the completely round shape of the mouse, not the weird sensors. The same lab had Sun workstations with the optical mice with the shiny metal mouse “pads” under them, but they both worked fine, as near as I can remember.
3:02 I like the visual demo you have of how the wheels move of a traditional ball mouse, essentially. It made it so clear when you moved your two-wheel demo rollers at different angles.
thank you so much for appreciating that demonstration, I put in a lot of work to make that and almost *nobody* even mentioned it, hah.
You missed a great chance to try an optical mouse on that surface. At least some optical mice wouldn't work there either. Recently encountered a Apple mouse spec'd in a situation with a white laminate counter, did not work at all.
I thought about that after the fact, but honestly what I decided to do was to post the video, wait for people to make suggestions about what else to test, and then I'll follow up with a short where I just quickly go through some other experiments
@@CathodeRayDude Yes! An optical mouse on glitter sounds like fun.
@@Kae6502 It will work fine, albeit perhaps with some stuttering, but mostly should be fine. Don't predict a problem. Not really an entertaining demo imo.
I miss going around my mom's office after school cleaning out all of the mice that weren't currently being used. I think it was more 'helpful' than helpful as this was the 90s, but it made kid me happy.
A person needs to have a particular experience set to understand the "built like an AMC inline six" reference, but for those of us who have had that sort of experience set [My first car was a 1965 Rambler Classic 660 station wagon with one of AMC's indestructible 232 cubic inch inline sixes.] the reference is guaranteed to bring a whopping great grin to our faces.
Thank you. You made my week.
Thank you for this. I really love your enthusiasm, research, and also your very thoughtful speculation. The not-Teflon demo was mind boggling.
So glad I found your channel today dude!! Love your content and how you do your videos. I can easily watch every second of your videos not only because I’m very interested in everything you do videos about, but you do it in a way that keeps my attention. Keep it up I’m here for it!
My elementary school actually had a few of the Keytronic versions of these mice on the old computers they had. I'm remember pushing the Keytronic button in a lot when using it wondering what it was for.
Thank you for demonstrating that the Hawley mouse both lives up to its patent but can actually function of oiled teflon. Who would have thought.
I had the Key Tronic mouse for my Amiga 4000T back in the day. It was a rock-solid device. The pads, when new, are a bit more grippy, but with age, lose that and cause the tracking to fall off a cliff. The Key Tronic one I could get new feet for until around 2006. A really bulletproof design.
Haha. I love how you created a whole narrative based on one picture of the dude.
It would be funny if it was from a costume party or something.
The turnaround after the test was a nice mea culpa.
Anyway, thanks man, interesting shit as ever.
I'm so glad I found this channel. You sir, are an A-class nerd. I thought my own collection of old hardware was weird, but you definitely won the mouse round. I can't wait to find out what else you have in store!
Dude! You're channel just continues to GROW and as it should! Such a wealth of information! Love these videos brother! 🤘😊
Back in college (well over 20 years ago) we had DECStations with those hockey puck mice. We also had Sun Stations with the optical mice, and RISC stations with ball mice. I found the DEC Station hockey puck to be kind of an awkard shape and indeed it had tracking problems. I wasn't a fan. I remember interpreting those tracking problems as being dirty and looking under the mouse ... and having no bloody idea how to clean it :)
Of the three, I tended to like the ball the best, despite sometimes having to clean them. The opticals weren't always so great, and sometimes the reflective pads that were required to use with them would "walk off" and render them completely useless.
Going into this video I thought it was going to be a mouse that interfaces with unexpected hardware. I had imagined you plugging it into a literal toaster and somehow being able to execute some functions. I got to the end of the video before I realized this video is not about what I thought it would be about.
10/10, would watch again.
I had an optical mouse back around 1984 or 85. I had an Apple IIc, and when I bought it, I also bought a copy of Bank Street Writer, which included an optical mouse and a metal mousepad with greenish grid lines on it. As I recall, the horizontal lines were a slightly darker shade of green that the vertical ones, though it could have been the other way around. I used that IIc all through High School. When I switched to a PC (Tandy 100TX) for college, I gave it to my dad for his company accountant to use, where they used it for many, many years. I really missed that mouse though, because it was so smooth, and always worked, unlike the ball mice that PC's used. When the first Microsoft IntelliMouse with IntelliEye came out in 1999, I snatched one up.
That Hawley mouse is pretty clever and the use of magnets is smart, it's pressure without friction.
Apple did make a big contribution to computer mouse design. Initially they were building prototypes with a steel ball and rollers covered with a rubbery material named Poron. Problem was either the steel ball would slide and skip on the surface, or the rollers would get dirty and slip, or get flat spots. Then someone had the brilliant idea to reverse it. Coat the ball with the rubbery material and make the rollers bare steel. Ding! Must have been quite the engineering process to figure out how to evenly coat and heavy steel ball. I do recall seeing several non-Apple mice with a few tiny holes through the ball coating. I assume made by tiny pins in the coating mold to hold the ball centered. There are a lot of mouse balls without such features.
A walk down manufacturing memory lane on how mouse balls were made would be interesting.
Your delivery and presentation is sooooooo good and entertaining! Keep it up Dude!
The Honeywell mouse wheel color was always that shade of off yellow. I always thought it was made out of some more grippy version of plastic. We still use ball mice everyday right now where I work because our lab desks are pure white, shiny, super clean laminate and optical mice have nothing to take pictures off to know there are moving. I knw the one I am using was made in 2003 and it's still working just fine.
The major thing I remember about the old ball mice is that they became "alcoholics" if you cleaned them too often. You cleaned the ball and other internals with alcohol, but the more often you did this, the faster they got dirtied up again because dust etc. stuck more easily. Eventually, the mouse had to be declared "alcoholic", and you got a new one.
One of the computer labs at my high school (in the late 90s/early 00s) was kitted out with these roller mice. I think the later version shown, at the end of the video, because I remember removing and reattaching the mouse buttons, as a fidget.
I don't remember exactly where they were used, it's been a while, but I _think_ it was the computer lab in the woodshop, where they thought technical drawing, CAD, etc. So it would make sense to use a mouse that was less susceptible to dirt, that building had a thin layer of sawdust on every surface. But also, kids are filth beasts and the ball mice in the other lab were always getting clogged.
Anyways, I don't remember them being particularly different from the ball mice in terms of tracking or whatnot, but it was a long time ago, so I probably wouldn't remember a detail like that even if it did. They worked well enough for school purposes, and the resilience was a major upside.
I also remember how goshawful the early consumer optical mice were. Horribly twitchy on any surface. Logitech initially solved it by releasing a dual laser version of their Mouseman, and later versions had better lasers that fixed the issue entirely. Also, CRC Electronic Cleaner cuts oil and grease like nothing else. Spray that on there and all that oil will run off like water.
I remember those!
I worked at a college in the mid 80’s and we where constantly losing mouse balls (because the students would remove them). When we discovered the Honeywell mice we immediately switched to them. No more missing balls!
By the way Honeywell sold those mice explicitly for industrial environments where a ball mouse would soon fail.
They also had a keyboard there was completely sealed and could be also be used in hostile environments. We also replaced the student keyboards with those as well.
Dirty mouse balls were such a nightmare especially in a manufacturing setting where a lot of dirt is in the air.
23:10 I appreciate the Kenosha Cadillac shout out!
Yes, the Honeywell mouse was an excellent design.
When i figured out how to clean the lint off of the rollers as a kid it was a huge breakthrough.
I'm gonna need the exact brand and color code you used for that wall.
Every time I come here I'm reminded how good a color that is, and I'd love at-least an accent wall of it.
I literally took a screenshot of Windows 95 and dropped it into the Sherwin-Williams color chooser
We had these at my school! 1996, Queensland Australia
3:43 “Englebart is the reason we all have mice on our desks” did he leave food out over the weekend again? Dang it Englebart!
Absolutely incredible design and throughout the video I became progressively more enamored with it, now I absolutely need to have one for my vintage computer collection. I'm about to throw away a bunch of ball mice!
Makes me wish I had one of these back in the day. No clunky ball inside banging around every time I lifted the mouse.
I used to work in a shop doing alignments and I'm pretty sure the computer had one of those mice. Makes a lot of sense now
The Alto was never shipped anywhere other than internally at Xerox, and some reports say a few universities as well. It was never a commercial product.
You have an insanely high charisma score. Instant sub