Mouse Systems 1986 Optical PC Mouse - LGR Oddware

Overview of the Mouse Systems optical PC Mouse from 1986! Optical pointing devices may not have become very common until the turn of the century, but we can go all the way back to the mid 80s to see their origins in the microcomputer market.
These were largely popular with businesses using workstation computers, like various Sun machines. It retailed at $295 USD in 1983!

[@LazerLord10]

I just watched a 17 minute video about a single mouse from 30 years ago. No regrets.

[@TheRedCap]

Total regrets: 0

[@BilisNegra]

No mystery there. It was An OPTICAL mouse manufactured in fucking 1986. That's almost an like a 1993 LCD TV ! Slight difference being the mouse is real.

[@TheMamaluigi300]

BilisNegra Well there was the Game Gear and the TV Tuner

[@yes.2875]

total regrets: *null*

[@bignotoriousd1]

You can't escape his voice. If voices were photogenic, his is ridiculously.

[@Supboss64]

originally retailed at $295 but you picked it up for 25 cents, gee times sure do change

[@shadowhamster6054]

What a great deal!

[@TheSqeeek]

And now that vintage computers are cool again, they're right back up to $300 :(

[@timothygreene881]

I couldnt find a source for that price. I would like to where he got that info. Also: Vintage computers sell for a shitload. I been sufring ebay seeing old dells for 800+ will "8" sold. Like WTF?!?

[@und4287]

@@timothygreene881 they think that old=rare=PROFIT.

[@Belbag]

Sometimes I don't realize how much time I spend binge watching LGR videos...

[@JcGross93]

I see what they did. The laser that comes out of the mouse is angled so that when the mouse is placed on a flat surface the reflected light reaches the sensor (therefore the two holes, one is the laser, the other one is the sensor). As far as I can tell the mouse pad has white dots on a dark surface. When the laser hits a white dot it more or less stays the same, but when it hits a dark spot it becomes a lot weaker. This means you have a binary input. By measuring time and the times of edge changes in the signal you can figure out how the mouse is moving. At least this is what I could gather from the video. It's primitive but clever.

[@moiquiregardevideo]

There is two LEDs: one is red, the other is infrared (like in remote for TV). The mouse pad is made of horizontal lines which reflect/stop the RED color in 4 stripes. The vertical lines are 4 stripes that reflect infrared. Like track balls and other mouses, the mouse need to detect 2 pairs of quadrature encoded signals. Here is some details about the older ball rolling mouse: The balls is coupled to two wheels with 64 to 100 holes. One wheel oriented horizontally, the other oriented vertically. On each wheels, two optical switches detect light thru these holes. One optical switch is 90 degrees shifted. Has the wheel rotate, the two optical switch detect the following sequence: off-off 0ff-on on-on on-off repeat... 100 times for one turn of the wheel. off-off 0ff-on on-on on-off At any time, if the wheel rotate in opposite direction, the order is reversed for these two optical switches. The optical mouse does the equivalent. The RED led is projected on the mouse pad. The red light reflect with 4 intensity: 0, 1, 2, 3 then the pattern repeat The red light detector watch for pattern of 4 intensity increasing, then falling to the lowest level. On each change, the position of the mouse counter is incremented. If the intensity reverse, going from bright to dim, the mouse counter is decremented. The infrared LED does the same 4 level intensity, but oriented in the other direction on the pad. The color filter on the mouse pad is designed to keep the infrared intensity the same when moving up/down (assuming this is the direction for the red led). Similarly, when the mouse move left-right, the reflectivity of the red color is kept the same while the infrared sequence thru the 4 levels. Brief, the mouse pad is designed to allow each of the two wavelength LED to interact in only in the horizontal direction for one and the vertical direction for the other.

[@BassGoesBoom1]

I remember in high school the computer tech used to superglue the opening where you could remove the ball and clean the mouse, i guess because kids kept stealing the balls.Downside was after supergluing them it was impossible to clean them.Horrible to use.

[@jekanyika]

I remember that

[@spinlathes9288]

BassGoesBoom1 Guess the kids in my school weren't that devious/clever.

[@dwarfbunni]

BassGoesBoom1 thats just what I was thinking when I saw that old ball xD

[@InsanePsychoRabbit]

BassGoesBoom1 My high school did the EXACT same thing, because the kids were always stealing the mouse balls. (I found one loose in a hallway once and still have it.) It would've made more sense to buy all optical mice to replace the ball mice, but the education budget in my state was being slashed constantly, so they probably couldn't afford it. Predictably, after a while, the mice got all dirty inside and hard to use.

[@harold105]

I put a piece of scotch tape on one of the laser mice in my highschool. Since it wasn't working, but still lit up, the teacher decided it was broken and threw it out.

[@BrowserError]

I stumbled across a mousepad like this today in a pile of garbage in a project room at my university. If I wouldn't have watched this video before going to work this morning, I would have never known what it was. What are the chances?

[@ModMINI]

I think early Unix GUI computers used a similar mouse. I remember seeing one of these mouse pads at my university in the early 1990s.

[@tomyyoung2624]

mouse is heros!

[@vwestlife]

I have one of those, complete with the mouse pad! It still works great after all these years.

[@chancersssblue1]

Your voice is so smooth and calm it made my sister fall asleep, and she never ever falls asleep. Anyway great review. Love your shows

[@AdmiralCreideiki]

So basically, it's like the laser mice you could find on some high end graphical workstations from the late 80s/early 90s? There's actually a comical story out there on the intertubes of one engineer with a similar kind of laser mouse, whose special mouse pad was rotated 90 degrees. The mouse wasn't working, so he called tech support to bitch at them. Tech support guy tells him the mouse pad is turned, engineer bitches more saying the tech support guy was wrong. Hilariously, tech support guy was both in the same building, and on the same office floor as him (only a few cubicles away), so he just walks up to the engineer's desk, rotates the mouse pad back to the proper direction and leaves. (I don't tell it as good as the original tale.)

[@michaelmichalski4588]

It's exactly the same mouse. They were made by mouse systems, with the sun interface on them, but looked identical..

[@KW160]

This is the same mouse that Sun used with their late 80s workstations. They called it a Sun Type 4 mouse and it used Sun's proprietary interface with no external power needed.

[@jarded056]

At schools kids would take the ball out of all of the mice leaving the computer almost unusable.

[@Vojingamer]

xD

[@SuperNathan90]

yes and the stoopid teachers used to superglue the cover and they stopped working after a while.

[@jarded056]

+SuperNathan90 Our teachers just waited it out until we got laser mice.

[@SuperNathan90]

it was a bit hard using an old pc

[@Vojingamer]

***** xD, you can bounce them around now

[@AndrewTSq]

As a kid in the early 80ies, my neighbour worked for a company that made military missiles, and he knew that I loved computers but only had a zx spectrum at the time, he said to me that they were going on vacation, and wondered if I wanted to borrow his IBM PC while they were away, and it felt safer for him aswell so no thieves took it. He had this mouse to the PC and it was like magic back then. Lasers were like in the future, but this mouse used it (or it looked like lasers to a small kid) and I remember trying the mouse on different surfaces and the pointer would go away :D fun stuff.

[@natedunn51]

Lasers are still listed as the future and have been in the works since the 50s.

[@purrbox7514]

I've just realised that my mouse is a laser mouse, you can't see the light (infrared)) and it tracks on glass surfaces.

[@sacripudding4586]

Purrbox its not a lazer. Its an optical mouse but it disables the light at certain angles and likely when its not moving. At least from what i know.

[@absalomdraconis]

If it works on glass, decent chance that it's laser based indeed.

[@987inuyasha]

Now we have mice with ARM processors and on-board memory, oh times are a-changing!

[@yeska62]

I was using this mouse in 1986! Never thought I would ever see it again. What a treat. Thanks Clint. 😀

[@Keranu]

Did it seem like a godsend back then? Like knowing you'd never have to clean a mouse ball again.

[@sirp0p0]

I giggled a bit when you identified the monitor on the MS Paint cover.

[@anonjenkins5521]

sirp0p0 uwu so cute teehee

[@d34d10ck]

It's not an optical mouse thing. Not in this case. It wouldn't be any different with a ball mouse. The reason for the edgy circles is the low update rate in which the input signal is processed. If the computer is only powerful enough to draw like six line-segments per seconds you can't draw a perfect circle. Every circle will look like a hexagon. BTW: I had one of those mice. It was a little bit annoying, that they only worked in right angles to the mouse pad, but they were still better than the ball mouse in my opinion.

[@supernova6486]

Ahh yes indeed friend its known as the polling rate listed as Hz/sec or updates per second a gaming mouse these days can do well over 1,000Hz/sec back then it might have been less than 100/hz sec its been a while since I had to think about mouse polling rates to be honest other than the higher the better lol.

[@bitwize]

Back in the days before scrolly mice, I was glad to have one of these kicking around. X11 requires three mouse buttons to generally operate, and with the old Mouse Systems mouse I still had, I could actually run X11 on my shiny new Linux and get three mouse buttons without having to do the awkward button-chording thing. Linux, being awesome, supported Mouse Systems and Microsoft rodents equally well.

[@ZXRulezzz]

It was a surprise to me that I could still use my Genius GM-6 serial mouse with modern Linux, even through an USB adapter, while Windows stopped supporting that stuff since 3.11, I think...

[@bitwize]

ZXRulezzz Come to think of it mine must have been a Genius mouse as well! It was identical to the GM-6 in casing and did not require a power supply (though my Wacom serial tablet did!). Also had a DE-9 connector.

[@ailivac]

Not copying X's middle button paste behavior is one of the worst decisions Microsoft made (ok, maybe not as bad as their case-insensitive filesystem, abomination of a shell quoting syntax, repurposing an escape character as a path separator, their lame excuse for a browser that had no purpose other than driving a more competent competitor out of business...)

[@charliekahn4205]

@@ailivac its purpose is playing Flash content really well.

[@garfiduper5822]

Fun Fact: This mouse can be seen being used in certain clips of the creators of Forrest Gump talking about the creation of the movie.

[@nameineedtochange3890]

Garfi Duper every days a school day with KZbin comments

[@brantisonfire]

It’s also in a deleted scene from Ferris Beuller where he’s in his room sitting at the computer changing his grades in the school computer system.

[@duckcowwaddlemoo8646]

You have a really calming voice , like I could really fall asleep to this,but awesome video .

[@zh84]

The first trackball I had was a Logitech model which had an interesting pattern of speckles printed on the ball. It may just have been decorative, but I thought at the time it was to help the optical mechanism read the ball's movement, just as with your special mouse pad.

[@derick1131]

Was it a red ball because i still have one of those. I don't use it still. But it was interesting

[@zh84]

derick1131 Yes: a red ball with a grey housing for the main device. I used it until it wore out.

[@derick1131]

zh84 I had the same mouse. I don't use it anymore, but it works.

[@compzac]

Those dots on the logitech trackballs were to help the sensor detect that the ball was moving, think about it, standard optical mice dont work on glass cause the surface is uniform, no changes that the optical receiver can detect, nowadays with laser mice and new optical tech, the sensors are accurate enough to detect micro scratches to work, but during those times not a happening, The ball is like a glassy surface, shiny but uniform, so the dots were put there to give the sensors something to detect, they actually still use the idea on the modern Logitech ergonomic trackball, though the ball is now sparkly metallic, not that its even needed cause the optical sensor is good enough to detect.

[@zh84]

@@compzac That's what I thought. Thank you.

[@bean420man]

You just gotta love how back in the eighties and 90s, everything came with so many instruction manuals and the most indestructible packaging cardboard could make. Man I would love to relive the 80's at my age.

[@manictiger]

Such a pain and the ass to keep ball mice clean. We shed skin cells at a pretty fast rate. If you ever look inside a computer, most of that dust is actually human skin. Well, that shit is horrible for ball mice.

[@garnetbezanson1404]

Ugh

[@AceStrife]

+manictiger My case has a top grille across the entirety of it. It sits off to the side of my desk, a foot away from me. I looked into it after a few months. My god.

[@funkyanimal5812]

+Ace dweebifier look at your name

[@creadcharles]

+manictiger Speak for yaself you filthy beast

[@manictiger]

creadcharles Depends on your definition of filthy. All living creatures are just bags of protoplasm.

[@bborkzilla]

The Sun Microsystems 3 68000-based workstations series used those mice

[@hjalfi]

Also the early Sparc-based Sun workstations I grew up with. Our lab had one computer with a real ball mouse. We'd fight over it.

[@grossteilfahrer]

Yeah sun slc elc and sparcstation 1 2 and 3. Also common on sgi machines. At my uni in 1996 we had both lowspec indy sgis and sparc elc. The sgi mouse pads was denser and wouldn't work right with sun mice so one day we changed over all the pads from one lab to the other... hilarity.

[@Yahriel]

whoa whoa whoa. Those texture things at the bottom menu? I REMEMBER THOSE. The one that looks like the top crust of an apple pie, and the one looks like olives...

[@tookitogo]

SkyWolfAlpha Yep, total clone of the patterns Susan Kare created for MacPaint!

[@KartKing4ever]

"Mouse Systems Corporation (MSC), formerly Rodent Associates, was founded in 1982 by Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse." What a legend.

[@Alex_Barbosa]

this is pc paint. this is pc paint. this is indeed pc paint. so yea this is pc paint.. xD

[@sacripudding4586]

alex Barbosa THE ORIGINAL

[@jhnbngtssn]

@@sacripudding4586 Basically a clone of MacPaint though

[@jbfarley]

@@jhnbngtssn nah

[@CarlosPerezChavez]

But is it PC Paint?

[@michael.carrot]

I wish I could subscribe to your channel twice

[@killme928]

+Cloverof4 Then Create Another Account (I'm Not Condoning It Nor Supporting it)

[@Grifter]

You can kinda... It's called hitting the notification bell. It's better than subscribing for the creator.

[@JuryDutySummons]

Just hit the subscribe button twice.

[@kevins9785]

I did. I do. I done.

[@antihumor2231]

Subscribe, unsubscribe, and subscribe again.

[@faronsquare]

My parents actually had one of these mice. I learned how to program in basic on that computer, since that's what booted up before I knew that it required a DOS boot disk. All I wanted to do was play games. Ended up writing my own. We got the PC second hand, and no one showed us how to use the mouse, so we never got it to work. I used to tell people that we had an optical mouse on a pre-386 PC but no one believed me! Hell, that may BE the mouse we used to have! Thanks for the video.

[@Tomsonic41]

When I was a kid I remember going into the university (where my dad worked) and seeing some of these mice connected up to Sun workstations. They had the mirrored mouse mat glued to the table so you couldn't have it the wrong way up!

[@Ropetupa]

This is like if you used a timemachine to go to the stone age, and there cevemen would show you their cellphones.

[@garnetbezanson1404]

The istone

[@redfinite27]

+Garnet Bezanson At least back then those iStones didn't break so easily.

[@austin5623isawesome]

But they didn't have a headphone jack.

[@pauljones3017]

@@austin5623isawesome : And probably not headphones either.

[@grootsyt]

@@pauljones3017 headstones

[@derschmiddie]

Hurray for the cereal port!

[@tonydarre9954]

Mmmmmm.... Cereal port

[@vonzellable]

Yet another moment that shows that I am getting really old. I remember using this mouse just like this on a Sun system in college.

[@BauTekIndustries]

Whoa! Thanks for the trip down memory lane, my dad brought one of these home from work with an EGA card and it blew our little minds back in the day.

[@LordHorde]

is that pc paint?

[@ronvalmores501]

dotLord this is pc paint.

[@AmaroqStarwind]

When I was a kid, I always referred to the Windows XP version of MS Paint as "Paint Program".

[@tvgerbil1984]

Pre-SPARC (Motorola based) Sun Microsystems workstations used these optical mice extensively in the 80's as well. The tablets, or mats, were not all of the same type either ... fun memory in sorting them out.

[@SiliconClassics]

Nice video! This mouse is pretty typical of the optical mice that came with UNIX workstations in the late 1980's (Sun, SGI, etc). Apparently if you lost the mouse pad you could print out a grid on a sheet of paper with a laser printer and it would work, but I never tried it.

[@michaelmichalski4588]

I wish I would have known that. I had one of the imai nice and the pad wore out.

[@greggv8]

Try it on Windows 95 through 10 and see if it works.

[@alwaysangry2232]

Somebody should show Vinesauce the true OLD paint

[@appelelle]

Clint, these videos really made you. So relaxed, so off the cuff. It's so good. It still is!

[@PicsBoson]

Wow, that was a flashback. Reminded me that we used some version of PC Paint in elementary school in early 90's. Might have been first time for me to use a PC. I don't believe we had a PC Mouse. After the drawing was done we printed it out of dot matrix printer.

[@Kaziklu]

I used to do graphic work for my father when his art department was closed. He'd give me horribly scanned images and I'd have to manually go in almost pixel by pixel to fix them so he could take it to a client. I used to get that far in with photo editing too for a long time. Today it just isn't really viable to do with 4000x6000 images but with 400x600 files it was fairly common. That mouse is kinda neat. a shame about the resolution though.

[@existenceisrelative]

Wait, was that PC Paint?!? I wish you'd have said something about it.

[@miguelrucoba]

Your voice is strangely soothing and I love it.

[@wayneparris3439]

What a great 7 year old video! I had one of these back when they were "new" and it was a vast improvement over a ball mouse. No dirt, it just works. My mouse pad was blue with larger grid squares on the pad but the squares were just for people, the mouse did not seem to be affected one way or the other by the grid. It had a very high resoultion for the time. Actually, I am sure I still have it in a long forgotten box somewhere. It cost too much to just toss in the trash. I bought it with my first 286, it had a whole meg of ram! That ram cost me $1000 at the time because there was a chip shortage at the time.

[@megamanfan3]

The Mouse Systems mouse was primarily used with the Visi On OS

[@charliekahn4205]

And also old versions of Unix-based systems that supported it

[@VoidHalo]

I think I'd rather take the 15 seconds to clean the gunk out of it once a week than have to deal with that mousepad.

[@davepruner]

I was the product manager for this product in 1982. I worked for a company called Summagraphics in Fairfield, CT. We made digitizers (Graphic Tablets) for High End CADCAM systems like Computervision, Applicon , Evans and Sutherland and Digital Equipment. These systems cost $1,000,000 per workstation in $1982 money. They were as powerful as many of todays high-end CAD workstations. They did Solids Modelling and Finite Element Analysis.We licensed this design from Mouse Systems and sold the SummaMouse. This is an optical mouse but its "camera" only has 4 pixels. It was the same 4 quadrant Infrared sensor use in the Sidewinder missile. It has a 286 processor which is the same Microprocessor as in the early PC's. The mouse pad has a grid of infrared absorbing ink lines which the mouse tracks. With only 4 pixels to work with, the mouse used predictive algorithms to track the surface of the pad. The ink came from imaging satellites which used these pigments "IR 99" to absorb stray light inside the IR cameras.The Mechanical mice at the time did not have the resolution needed to work on the high resolution monitors used on these system. Our version of this mouse hade 1,000 resolution while mechanical mice at that time only had 100-200 LPI.

[@NikolajLepka]

It's fun to see how much more complicated everything was back in the 80s when it came to computers nowadays everything's just plug and play, and you don't have to worry about manually installing drivers, or correctly configure the cards you plug into the motherboard.

[@Matrilwood]

I used to do pixel art when I was younger and having a grid was invaluable. :3

[@shadowhamster6054]

Dank drawing skills

[@LGR]

THANX

[@hermanngunning375]

You are fucking stupid

[@AngelaTheSephira]

no one cares thx m8

[@drewgehringer7813]

I actually have one of those mousepads too, my dad has one from WAAAAY back when he worked for Sun Microsystems in 1987. According to him Sun Microsystems had a mouse almost exactly like this back then, either one of these mice with Sun branding, or this is a branded version of that 3-button Sun mouse. From his memory it's the latter, Sun made the optical mouse he's thinking of in-house, but he could be wrong.

[@Veditor78]

My grandfather had one of these. I remember it well. Thanks for bringing back that memory.

[@stonent]

These types of mice were standard issue on the old Sun 4(c,m) based Sparcstations. I think the pad I had showed a Sun logo on the bottom corner and the mouse itself plugged into the sun proprietary connector on the keyboard. (i.e. not serial)

[@MechWizzard]

I thought i recognized that mouse, especially having to keep the dammed thing upright!

[@bwzes03]

We had those same mice, Sun logo on them, of course in college. We used them on LC, IPC, IPX and the Classic Workstations. the later Ultra Enterprise came with different mice.

[@zorinlynx]

They kept using this technology into the mid-to-late 90s, updating the style of the mouse but still requiring the stupid grid pad. I'm so glad Microsoft brought the universal surface optical mouse to market when they did!

[@dee5298]

You missed a great opportunity for a dirty balls joke.

[@Sam-lr9oi]

"Load as" is legitimately the thing that caught me most off guard in this, besides of course an optical mouse from such an early date.

[@maniaco200]

techmoan and this channel are in my top 5 channels for sure!

[@yokab]

What was the name of the software that he painted with?

[@GlitchGoblin]

Kobi Tzarfati Pc paint.

[@yokab]

GlitchGoblin You must be real fun in parties

[@GlitchGoblin]

Kobi Tzarfati Haha, why so?

[@danielharvey488]

GlitchGoblin it was a joke, he said pc paint a lot :P

[@GlitchGoblin]

Daniel Harvey I knew that, I was just clarifying it for him just to make sure he wasn't an idiot.

[@dickkickem]

14:02 A E S T H E T I C

[@jca111]

Ahh I remember early optical mouses. I used to use them on Sun Sparc stations in the late 80s/early 90s. I loved them and remember when I got a job on PCs hating the ball mouses that I had. Thankfully optical mouses came back, with the modern ones not needing any mat.

[@jeanpt]

The jagged circle drawing mostly comes down to sample rate. When you move the mouse slowly the hardware can track the location accurately but when you move the mouse quickly the recognised locations are more separate and thus your circles look more like polygons.

[@Mobliz]

i hated ball mice soooo much.

[@westmcallister6685]

null

[@Alex2001646]

I like ball mouses because I like to mess with the ball. OCD

[@zwz.zdenek]

The usability was horrible, but most of my memories are with ball mice, so that's that. Having a reliable mouse now makes life a little boring.

[@chippydippy1530]

Mobliz I like ball mice but that's because of them being fun to play with. Not ideal for use though.

[@Lyne_Taperz]

Losing the ball inside while playing with it and buying a new one just because I couldn't find it... Ah, those pure memories.

[@zaneroote5798]

pcpaint looks more like mac paint

[@meyakabrown4725]

I really enjoy your Oddware series. Thank you, I appreciate your effort and channel. Keep up the great work bro.

[@Shatteredhelix]

While I myself didn't have one of those optical mice when they were new, my friend that lived across the street had one for an old 80s mac when we were growing up, so when you said that you didn't know what that shiny thing was I was thinking "how? isn't it obvious?" I know that sounds like kind of an arrogant thing to think, but it just goes to show that people that are familiar with some older technologies can't understand why some people that aren't can't figure out at a glance what it is. To me it obviously looked like a mouse pad, and that's not taking into account my already knowing what it was. Again, I really enjoy all of your oddware videos and give you a big two thumbs up for this one.

[@djhart25]

Weren't those 3 button mice made specifically for RISC OS?

[@nennoable]

The ones for the SPARC machines (like the IPX) were different albeit similar in design (they had a mousepad with a grid pattern on it). By RISC OS, he means Acorn. Never used Acorn systems but I perfectly remember cheap PC (ball) mice with a switch to Mouse Systems standard until the second half of the 90s. So they had PC products for sure, not just workstations.

[@privatedood1]

It looks pretty much identical to the mice supplied with Sun-2 and -3 systems in 80s. My guess is that this is an attempt to cash-in on existing hardware in a new market. Those old Sun machines were streets ahead of 80's PCs.

[@Hellforsa]

i remeber the ball mouses :)

[@gtametro]

wow you must be ancient, like over 30 or something, lol old.

[@Hellforsa]

i hope you guys are sarcastic, im 24

[@devicemodder]

currently using a ball mouse, also have one with serial, only mouse that will work on my desk.

[@ThorCrushGood]

I remember they had them at my old elementary school (I'm 20 now.) Kids would take them out and throw them at each other.

[@westmcallister6685]

Hahahahaha still using one as my everyday mouse!

[@admaerable]

When i was a kid I saw a joke about price list at computer repair store with this line in it: ''Repairing an optical mouse by rotating the mousepad 90 degrees - 35 bucks". Now I at last saw that mouse :)

[@AChannelFrom2006]

I got my first ball-less mouse in Dec 1990. When I first saw it I thought it as magical. It also came with 3 x 10 packs of 1.2Mb floppy disks for like $29.95. Singapore used to be so cheap.

[@MrROTD]

ugggg I dont miss ball mice, they friggin sucked

[@KOTEBANAROT]

+Rex Holes ikr they made the mouse so heavy and uncomfortable to move around and it gets dirty so easily especially if you're a kid who eats snacks while playing Worms, ugh :L

[@licentiousdreams]

They sucked balls... Sorry, I had to.

[@LouiesWorkshop]

WHO IS WATCHING THIS IN 2019?

[@MuffinMcCartney]

🐱

[@dvdemon187]

How did this video elude me this long? Back in the 90s my aunt did some serious CAD work with this type of mouse at her workplace on her SGI Indy running Unix. I also pulled such a mouse pad from a waste bin at an office cleanout, because I actually knew what it was and always thought it looked kinda cool. Later I gave it to my aunt as a nostalgic gift and she uses it every day. Of course it works with modern optical mice too, it's sturdy and looks cool. Shame they don't make these anymore. The pads that is, not the mice...

[@ellisgl]

The first time I came a across an optical mouse was we got 2 or 3 Spacstation-IPC boxes (Dad got them from work - they were being trashed). MicroSoft came out with their first optical mouse, and my god that was amazing. No need for a special mat, wasn't clunky, has more mouse "buttons" then that did. Also hooked up via USB

[@waifu3070]

In school if there was ball mouses we would take the ball. Hehe

[@tonydarre9954]

*Ball mice

[@jamesharmer9293]

Referred to as a female mouse at the time, because it didn't have any balls...

[@DerrickMims]

That "read this first" joke was terrible. Good work. I love this channel.

[@chanbyun1676]

I used to have one back when I had my very first computer back in the late '80s. I enjoyed it very well.

[@mdhoward3080]

Yep, worked on a Sparc 10 Sun Workstation back in the early 90's and it had the same exact mouse but with the Sun logo on it!

[@rhaeven]

I had an Atari ST when I was a kid. That mouse is good at picking up dirt and needs really regular clearing out. Seeing you flip it over and open it up gave me mad nostalgia feels!

[@fusion3d581]

Lazy game reviews, I love your channel. No lie, really, really awesome stuff to watch.

[@LGR]

Thank you!

[@_LM_]

Man, this brings back some memories. I had a 3-button Mouse Systems mouse on my first DOS PC (8 MHz XT clone), back in 1987. It was the regular ball type (not optical) and it cost me a bargain of $40. I used it with Cakewalk Professional for DOS (MIDI sequencer) - yes, mouse support on a text-mode DOS program. It also came with that same PC Paint, which actually looked better on a monochrome CGA monitor: different shades of green (or whatever color your monitor was), rather than pink and blue. I remember that the manual even came with examples on how to add mouse support to your own Basic programs. Good times...

[@TheUltimateGwonam]

The moment when I see a new LGR video in my subscription box... Excellent.

[@idarkpuppet]

man -- I remember all those old Sparc systems that had these mice -- the mousepads for those had a grid printed on them IIRC. These systems were reserved for the engineers. Loved working on the Sparcs because the model 50s and PS2s had ball mice you had to clean out every other hour. The Sparcs were also the only ones on the coax ethernet, while the IBMs were token ring. Also fun finding that one terminator that went missing in the ethernet loop.

[@avongil]

I had one on a 286 purchased in 87. I felt like all mouses after that were a step backward untill modern opticals came out . I loved it. Always wondered why the pad was glued to the desk!

[@mchenryneko]

I used this kind of Mouse on a SUN CAD-Workstation in 1990 :-)

[@DelphinusVyse]

I remember there being a mouse like this on one of the PCs at the library for the elementary school I went to in Connecticut. I don't remember if the mouse itself looked exactly like that, but I clearly remember it having a metal mouse pad like that with the special pattern on it and it wouldn't work without the pad. This would have been in the early 90s.

[@DynamixWarePro]

Its amazing to see how far we have come in terms of what you get when you now purchase something like a mouse, compared to all that stuff that came with that mouse! I used to dislike ball mice a lot, mostly for the gunk in the rollers. Also when I was in high school, people used to take out the mouse balls from most of the computer mice and you pretty much couldn't use the PCs in the school well and it happened quite a bit until they all got replaced by optical ones with no ball. Really don't miss ball mice, but I do like collecting unusual computer mice whenever I find them, and I still have a few ball mice.

[@theexplosionist2019]

That's some seriously cutting edge technology you've got there.

[@williamhayden7711]

Oh and the main drawbacks to this mouse were: 1. The mouse had to be oriented to the mouse pad. As you demonstrated it starts to act funky when the mouse is at an angle to the grid. 2. The mouse pad itself. These would get scratches, worn or lost rendering the mouse useless. The felt on the bottom of the mouse was intended to help protect the mouse pad, but other things would cause wear.

[@juanmbt]

I remember when I was a student in the 90s, they had some Sun UltraSPARC workstations that used similar optical mouses. As the mouse pads were lost or stolen we had some transparent plastic sheets with a grid printed on them to use as pads.

[@MicrophonicFool]

Part of what we used to buy this mouse for was our Autocad users. Being three-button, the extra button could be assigned to a special often-used command within Autocad. Also the accuracy on it was pretty damn good for the period, in particular it was way more accurate than any ball mice of the time. In Autocad you don't have to draw the curves yourself, it's always a command that does that. The ones we were using were from early 90's and had improved before actual Optical mice cam about.

[@cowboyatthebebop]

You seem much more comfortable doing videos now. Great improvement

[@arokace]

I was happy to see that this was record/released in 2012 because I was getting worried about how you presented this. Luckily your presentation with how you do your videos and your "presence"/personality is waaaay better now compared to this video at least.

[@basacis]

These mice were used on CAD workstations at Chrysler. I got one of these second hand from my grandfather who was an early CAD designer.

[@theflinx]

I watched this and nostalgia'd all over myself. My uncle had that mouse, and I used PC paint, lemmings, and arkanoid. PC paint was a really nice program for it's day. That magnification mode was really nice for making precise changes to image files.

[@Damaniel3]

I used a mouse very similar to this in the mid-90s while I worked in a lab filled with Sun SPARCStations. They all used optical mice, complete with reflective mouse pads just like this one.

[@Zerbey]

The Sun workstations we had in University used the exact same mouse, they were absolutely awful. If you didn't have the "pad" oriented perfectly they didn't work. Plus, they broke all the time. I'm astonished yours has lasted all these years.

[@ericpullen524]

Used one of these in the mid-90's on a Sun Microsystems workstation. I used the workstation to test and repair Cisco routers. Only one I ever used like that.

[@Christopher_Samaan]

lethargic game reviews... you really go into depth, my friend!

[@Caseytify]

I once owned the 1984 model. What the author here doesn't seem to realize is that the Mouse Systems mouse enjoyed far higher resolution than ball mice of the time, not to mention the flexibility of three buttons, including "chording,' such as pressing the left+center buttons at the same time. It was a lovely little creature, in many ways ahead of its time.

[@kanalnamn]

I got one of these (or a very similar) lying around here somewhere. This type of raster based optical mouses were very common in the Unix-world. I used them alot on Sun computers back at university in the 90s. One drawback is that the raster wears out when the pad gets worn. So with time it will only work on parts of the pad.