Another interesting thing about the bus mouse, and the reason for the 9-pin connector is that there is no processor on the mouse. Even PS/2 mice had a small processor since PS/2 was a data bus (GND, CLK and DATA) so it had to figure out movements and send data over the PS/2, where the bus mouse is completely dumb and all the processing is done on the card itself.
for us it was about 7000€ for the new licence (per copy) and now it is about 2000€ for the yearly "subscription" that lets you get the new version and you are able to use the programs at a second pc at home...support is not included, the new versions ALWAYS have major flaws, I have to pay for several apps in the package that I will NEVER use-- and a nice feature is that it takes a lot of space on your system drive (even when installed somewhere else) and good luck uninstalling the package- because you can't... you have to uninstall the 64 components (yes 64 components for like 4 apps) manually and when the day is over there is still some shit hiding on your drive....
It is bad when third party autodesk support forums are more useful than the actual help site. Half my time in civil 3d is spent digging through forums trying to figure out why a corridor or pipe network isn't working right. Or why the storm and sanitary analysis software works sometimes but not all the time. As for the subscription it is kinda nice having the newest version available but that also means new and exciting bugs in the system! Civil 3d 2019 fixed a number of things I didn't like in 2018 but presented plenty of new challenges. Before that my office had been on 2013 for years and at least it had familiar problems and we knew the bugs.
The thing about entering text into a box was pretty common amongst most graphics software at the time. Even professional applications like Aldus Freehand and Adobe Illustrator made you enter your text into a box, and then if you had to change fonts or type styles, you would edit in the text window. To have text follow a path for example, the workflow for this was as follows; you'd lay down a path (a bezier curve, shape, etc.) then open the text tool, type your text out and format it the way you needed. The text would appear on the drawing, To have the text follow your path you'd select the text and the path and choose "Text on a path..." then adjust the look and position of the text inline, however, to edit the text, you'd still open the text window and make your changes. Believe me, when Freenand introduced inline text editing (v 4.0), it was a welcome addition and cut down on the additional steps necessary to create text effects. Also, I noticed when the text was laid down in Paintbrush, it was inserted as an object, with handles. I don't know if you saw them but you could probably have manipulated them to get the look you were going for. Weird that changing text attributes just lays down more text boxes. My go to app for reading old graphics formats is Thorsten Lemke's GraphiConvertor for the Mac. It's still out there and can read anything. I had some old Degas files from the Atari ST when I was transitioning to the Mac and it read them up like a champ and exported them out as TIFFs. Very cool video.
Our first PS/2 mouse was of that physical design. I need to find it again... It's in some box, somewhere. I guess I also need to find the SNES mouse since the ball was missing when I got it, and the only ball I could find out of all of our mice that was the right size was from that old Microsoft mouse so I borrowed the ball but never returned it home.
I'd guess that the InPort mouse actually sold quite well, based on how many cards and mice I've seen. I also have a set of adapters for InPort mice to serial and (I think) PS/2.
Wow, CNIB - awesome... If you call MS or walk into an MS Store, they'll probably honor the warranty - you'll get just a basic MS USB Mouse as a replacement... ;)
I'm sure you had to click and drag a bounding box for the text tool to properly place the text. Just one click meant that the horizontal length was set to 1 pixel causing all the characters to warp to the next line, giving an effect of vertical text.
What a buggy PoS software that looks to be. I think what happened with the text is that the width was reset to 0 when you selected a new font. You were probably supposed to first select the font, then use the text tool. It look like it had handles on the sides and corners for resizing the box, just like in modern MS Paint. The out of memory error was probably due to not deallocating the memory of the current image before creating a new one.
Yeah I saw that although I think you only tried a corner one. Maybe you needed to use the left or right one to adjust the width, while the corners act as "move".
Never had a bus mouse, but I did have a Mouse Systems Optical Serial Mouse with 3 buttons on my PCjr. The optics required a special reflective metal mouse pad, and the serial connector had a jack for power in off a separate wall wart. I wonder what versions of Windows would still understand that bus card and be able to use it. I'd expect anything before XP likely would work since those OS's basically run on top of DOS. Chances are you'd be hard-pressed to find a system with ISA slots that will run Windows 10, but I know serial mice still work on 10.
Isn't it amazing all the documentation/junk you used to get, even with simple peripherals like this? Of course, this mouse was probably quite expensive at the time :)
hey, don’t copy that floppy! Imagine coming home with your newly bought mouse only to figure out you need to wait a month before the correctly sized floppies arrive in the mail...
One thing that always amazes me is how often we can find completely unopened computer products from that decade. Back in those days buying a computer was about the equivalent of buying a car. You'd think that if someone paid that kind of money for something, they'd actually use it. Yes, I get that some of the stuff may be NOS, but still of it you can find with original receipts
DIN-5 for keyboards... yes. not for mouses. "abused rs232" db25 and db9 and mouse bus (same size but not the same pins as minidin) for mouses. 'before' the ps2 minidin used for both mouses and AT protocol keyboards (actually the DIN keyboards are still in use to this day, as they simply suck less, don't fall out of the connectors, and have a sturdy well shielded connection and a working protocol which doesn't require fucktard 'licenses' like usb). it's the thing to go for if you want to sell products that -work-. the DIN-5 keyboard standard is used both with the XT keyboard protocol and the AT keyboard protocol tho. that's a bit of a compatibility issue although most keyboards autodetect and support both. to keep it nice and confusing for the user, the DIN-5 was also used for the cassette port on the original ibm pc (pre-XT) (excellent screw up ibm ;)
those microsoft mouses as depicted in the video actually mostly came with a DB9 connector fitted and conversion cable to mousebus and DB25 in the box. (as well as z-soft paintbrush and the mickeysoft mouse driver disk) the isa card wasn't included with the db9 model.
My dad had a standard Microsoft Mouse that looked like this one on his c. 1994 Windows 3.1.1-equipped Gateway 2000 system, not sure if it included Paintbrush or not (I don't think it did, but it had AUTOCAD). It was a PS/2 mouse I believe as well.
Great video! I bought this exact same mouse in 1989 for my XT clone, then installed it into my 486 when I upgraded to that. By the time I had a Pentium, it was PS/2 all the way.
I still have my InPort ISA card,. Used it with a Micro Solutions trackball back in the day. I'd love to have a new CST trackball (basically a modern USB Microsolutions), especially since using a computer is a little more harder with my surgery, but alas, I don't have a hundred bucks to be spending on a CST trackball.
Those tall round can buzzers aren't actually piezoelectric, just a coil with a metal membrane on top. I know because it's easy to destroy them while trying to desolder with excessive heat.
I think this ZSoft Paintbrush software is what made the .pcx image format popular at least for a brief period of time, until the .gif superseded it in the mid-90s. Paintbrush in Windows 3.x and NT 3.x fully support reading and creating new .pcx files. Windows 95 Paint opens them but doesn’t generally support creating new .pcx files. Windows NT 4 also has an Imaging software that views .pcx files.
I remember getting a copy of the original PC Paintbrush program from ZSoft with my first IBM-compatible PC. It looked quite similar to this Microsoft-branded version. ZSoft created the .PCX file format.
11:19 "…from the backup copy of your Setup disk" Wow, it actually knows it had been copied? Wow. I'm guessing it uses similar techniques to copy-protection mechanisms on program and game disks. 17:08 That reminds me of how windows are positioned in TWM (it was done entirely manually!) Also, it probably expects you to DRAG to select an area.
The disks are not copy protected. In fact the manual recommends making backup copies of the disks and then installing it from them. That way there is no chance of the setup process accidentally overwriting data on the original disks.
It's amazing how computers have changed throughout the years. I remember the tandy computers i used at school in the first grade. II think they were already 5 or 6 years old back in 1995 or 96
It's amazing to think that even in the late 80s a mouse was considered a novel luxury for computer use. That's just mind-blowing to me that you would literally have DOS programs which did not support a mouse as late as 1988! The 90s was truly a renaissance of computer development. It was the decade of digital progression and widespread acceptance. Things like this are so damn nostalgic. I'm glad to have grown up when I did and have memories of those days, but still be alive now when things have progressed to where it is.
you must be a millennial. everything that you did command wise such as drop down menus and clicking buttons could be done faster by the tab, cursor and spacebar/return keys. Even windows didn’t “require” a mouse.
It looks like the text boxes had grab-handles so you could stretch it out and make the text horizontal. :P I like that style of Microsoft mouse; I'd like to find a serial version someday.
Maybe I was in the wrong cursor mode or something, but I couldn't grab onto the grab handles -- the pointer just gave me the "hand" cursor which moved the whole thing around.
Neat. PCX was the first graphics file format I ever implemented from scratch, in Turbo Pascal 5.5, because ZSoft would send you a booklet with the specification for free. XD
I have a 286 desktop computer from around 1990 that has a bus mouse port built-in on the motherboard. I'm hoping someday to find a suitable mouse to go with it. But I guess a serial mouse will have to do for now :P
The problem you had with creating a new file in Paint was that you tried to save the old file instead for discarding it with no. To make it type the text horizontally you should drag to the side, not just click.
I had a mouse that looked like a PS2 port mouse in the early 2000s... and when I plugged it into a PS2 port? The wire literally burned and I pulled it out and it melted into my skin and I still have burnt rubber from it under my skin to this day. I have no idea what kind of mouse it was but the port looked like a PS2 port to 13 year old me... and stupid me plugged it in. So maybe there was another entirely diff one? It LOOKED like an average microsoft mouse too... that's whats odd and it burnt out my PS2 port so I had to use a USB one early on when most used PS2.
Ah, now I know why my serial mouse at COM1 stops working whenever I try to access the modem at COM3. Didn't know COM1 and COM3 share interrupts. Despite Bus Mouse never catching on in the PC market, it ended up becoming the standard mouse interface for NEC PC-98 computers. My NEC PC-9821Lt laptop has a BusMouse port on it.
COM1 and COM3 shared the same IRQ 4. COM2 and COM4 shared IRQ 3. Even and odd, that was the rule of thumb. You can't use 1,3 nor 2,4 ports simultaneously
I had this on a PC back in 95/96, and tried to switch over to Linux. Couldn't get it to work, so it was a couple more years till I had a Linux box running in my house.
You should try IrfanView for your oddball files as it reads a metric S-ton of image, audio, video and other file types. You just need to make sure you get the add-on zip file that contains the code to read them. I have it on my Win98, XP, and Win7 machines. I even use it at work sometimes when I need to do some basic edits to import image files into AutoCrash, I mean CAD.
The serial port was primarily intended for modems...Apple was the only manufacturer that used the serial port for printers. Even at that, you could buy a Centronics parallel port card for non-Apple printers on the Apple ][.
Or you could buy a new HP mini-form PC with a PS\2 and serial port adapter that goes into the expansion slot to run a PS\2 mouse and keyboard that I am using right now. Now I can use my 2008 PS\2 keyboard and a 1998 Compaq ball mouse as they had intended.
I loved this!! Thanks, You're Quite Fun! S l o w e d this down to watch \ read & 'hear' what you were doing\saying. DOS Rules. Glad it was you, not me. I am jealous - Wish i knew [remembered, understood] more. I would have some same issues, 'don't save, not enough memory'. Silly Did I see 1984 - 89 paintbrush copyright? W0W! well you did say DOS. (ver. 7)? There was a speed control mentioned, hope it worked. What A Trip !! TBC? cheers ~ *
