Q500, The Weirdest Optical Mouse 

I bought five of these NOS off eBay as a teenager in the late 90's. Mice would outlast the pads so I used Paint Shop Pro to make wider pads since I was using Q500's well into the widescreen era. Great vid as usual!

Top notch editing with the Metalocalypse bit.

I learned about Optical Mice from Branch Education and it blew my mind in how they worked.

1. I think that most modern mice send pulses about 1,000 times a second. 2. I'm surprised that the Mouse Systems mouse didn't just use a light-pipe type fiberoptic to move the light from the lenses to their respective sensors. I mean bouncing the light off of a mirror mounted to the rear shell seems like it could be fidgety if the fit/finish on the shell was a little off. 3. Oddly enough one of my friends was allowed to temporarily swap his mouse with his father's (his father had a ton of tech toys in the era such a pretty high end Mac for his work complete with a rather nice monitor with composite video and an Apple TV for the family computer back in the mid-to-late '90s) and that was the first time I saw an optical mouse-gridded aluminum pad and all back in the mid-to-late '90s just a few brief years before the IntelliMouse Explorer showed up. 4. I'm pretty sure that you're right that your odd mouse is effectively built from ball mouse parts. My guess is that it was meant as one of those stop-gaps that tend to come up as technology changes (like how they started putting projector T.V. units into rather tall T.V. shells to create big-screen, rear projector T.V.s to compete with the plasma and L.C.D. flatpanel T.V.s that started showing up). 5. All of those unusual features on the odd mouse is most definitely a company trying to make their product stand out and actually does remain a fairly popular tactic. I have an Asus motherboard from about 2004 that features their "Instant Music" feature which lets you use your CDROM drive as a CD player without actually booting into the system (the thought might have been for those building early livingroom P.C.s for playing digital media or perhaps for those in smaller apartments in Asia so that they could also use their P.C. as a shelf-system CD player). Heck, I recall that some Samsungs as late as the Galaxy S5 had really weird features to set them apart like a baby crying detector.

My best guess as to why the 3 holes would be there is just a way for the coffee to drip out if you spilled it on your mouse :P

If I remember correctly. the Mouse Systems mouse is also sensitive to the orientation of the special pad.

I bought Microsoft’s first optical mouse, the Intellimouse Explorer in 1999. It was expensive, but goddamn it was worth it.

That Patreon shout out scroll was 🔥

Also, it's pretty hard to gauge whether or not this mouse really WAS really popular. Stuff may not seem popular in the US or UK, but could have been extremely massively successful in Korea and Japan, even Norway, and we'd never know. One-off regional splash hits happened all the time under the radar, especially pre-internet.

I used it on Sun workstations. The first mouse, that is. Came with this weird mouse mat, well, mouse board. And the mice didn't work if you turned the mat by 90 degrees. 25 years ago, you say?

So just using different color LEDs this could use a proper checkered mousepad, all with a ballmouse chip? How does the rotaty encoder know which direction the transition is going with just one sensor, are they also in pairs?

The only ball mice that I use on purpose nowadays are mice for old game consoles like my Dreamcast.

I know this is ridiculous to think but I find myself wondering "yeah but what if it was EVEN CHEAPER?"

Now I am confused why my school used ball mice back in 2009

Could it be that the three holes are just a remnant of an earlier idea that they just couldn't bother to remove from the finished product? They already made **a couple cost cuts**, so I feel like that wouldn't be too unbelievable.

When you opened that mouse up and I saw those light pipes, I thought “that damn thing is a ball mouse emulator”

I remember a friend of mine back in college calling those early optical mice as "female mice". I have never heard anybody else use the term and I wonder if somebody was joking with her and she didn't realize it. Like somebody told her they were female mice because they have no balls and she just assume they were being serious.

A friend of mine once stole all the trackballs from our jr. high's computer lab. Later that day we chucked them all at kids on the playground. People were still finding them years later in random places. Good times.

Those sensors are probaby phototransistors - labelled "PT" on the board, and cheaper as they need minimal electronics to read the output as the signal from a strong source is higher than photodiodes.

I'm reminded of how trackballs are *basically* ball mice put upside down, and the modern optical trackballs conceptually just treat the ball as a globular mousepad that you move around instead of the mouse itself.

hello hi, I would just like to note that after reviewing the text of the patent again, I believe I may not have correctly described how the mouse systems design works. You can see the patent number in the video if you'd like to read it yourself, but I believe it is stating that the cells are read at three levels, not simple binary, and that custom motion prediction algorithms are used instead of the simple Grey code approach that I was picturing. there may be other misinterpretations. I do think they're semantic however, overall my description of the process is pretty close to accurate I believe. Also! I mixed up my dates, the intellimouse of 96 was a ball mouse; intellieye came out in 99, so this thing was way ahead of it's time!

The "zinc trophy' line killed me 😆

This is by far way more entertaining and engaging than it has any right to be. Your clever, witty, sometimes sarcastic and clear/concise/informative presentation is the selling point of your videos. You're genuinely easily one of the best retro tech youtubers right now, mark my words, your channel will explode in subscriber count sooner than later, you deserve it by way of merit.

"Mom can we have optical mouse?" "No, we have optical mouse at home." Optical mouse at home:

Keeping that mousepad out of sight up to the right moment was a stroke of genius.

Ben from Applied Science said in one of his videos that he designed a mouse that was entierly based on fiberoptics so it could be used inside a MRI machine

A 27 minute video about an out of date computer mouse? Yes please. I was genuinely excited to see this pop up today 🙌

The holes in the bottom could be used for some sort of factory test/programming if they line up with pads on the PCB.

I’ve been watching this channel since “The NES is a radio” video. Watching it grow and evolve has been awesome.

"They actually do not help the mouse figure out where it is... Or even where it isn't." I see what you did there :)

The engineers behind the mouse are absolute madlads, huge props to them.

The squarishness of your circles might be due to the "Enhance pointer precision" option in Windows, which in spite of its name makes the pointer less precise by squaring off movements that are almost-but-not-quite vertical or horizontal. I hate it. It's especially annoying for CAD or graphics.

This design is unique enough that it likely was patented somewhere. The Microsoft Mouse RS-232 protocol only ran at 1200 baud, so time sharing the sensor at 2x that rate for readings was well within the capabilities of the tech of the time.

My favorite jokes that you make are the ones you cut off mid word.. “I’m sorry, I promise, that’s the last su-“ 😂😂😂

So, are you telling me I could have made my own optical mouse at home using my ball mouse?! The levels of frustration I went through until I could afford an optical mouse!

16:59 this is exactly how a rotary encoder for a mouse scroll works! the binary output is 00 01 11 10 00 for clockwise and 00 10 11 01 00 for anti-clockwise. i found this out after thinking a bit on how to use one of those rotary encoders for a steering wheel controller

Opening up that weird mouse was the second best reveal I've ever seen on youtube. It would be first except for the four SD card memory video camera shot you did.

It's important to remove the cat before testing a mouse.

Love the face reflection off the aluminium pad while you're explaining things. Subtle yet quality!

i remember early SGI machines super computers and Sun machines using these kind of optical mice with the special pad late 80's early 90's

Hell, replace the two infrared leds with a red one and a blue one, then print a grid of red and blue lines as big as you want.

“…Let’s make a short story long” That’s why I am here.

Funny story about rotary encoder's and a trackball I bought my mom in the late 90's. She kept complaining that the trackball would just stop and start working, but she lived two states over so I couldn't figure out what was going on...until I visited. Sure enough, I was on her computer and the trackball just quit working. I traced it down to her desk lamp. It was so bright that enough light leaked through the plastic to flood the optical sensor with light and it couldn't tell the shutter wheel was spinning.

Betting that the three holes are for test points to test the electronics once assembled

two of them

Damn. I remember those old Sun mice - my dad had one and although we’ve updated at the factory, we still have the mouse pads on our ion implanters!

I'm almost always impressed at the lengths we go through for cheapness. Of course, it's not as useful as cheap lights and other cheap commodities, but still, damn.

The mouse knows where it is at all times.

you have no idea how much i needed a new CRD today (I saw the pre-screen version pop up in Discord at like 5 AM but I fell asleep and dreamed of cleaning out the blades of a lawn mower).

The Boy

I totally had some weird optical mouse with the special pad in the mid 90s. I can't remember if I bought it at a hamfest or a DAK catalogue. It might have even came in a package with GEM Desktop and Ventura Publisher.

"Joystick mode" reminds me of anchored auto-scrolling through documents.

I have been wanting to work that Metalocalypse NOTHING clip into a video for years now. You have bested me at my own game.

"Why does RU-vid keep recommending me this video about a weird mouse?" "Oh hey someone I'm subscribed to uploaded a video. I should watch it." "Oh..." lol

I remember the sun mice on grid pad. They were bad as well when you were tilted off x/y axis.

Speaking of optical mice: I'd genuinely love to know why optical mice are coming back now after we finally started ditching them for laser mice back in the late 00's. Back in the late 00's and early 10's, all the high resolution gaming mice (like the legendary Logitech G5) were moving away from inaccurate, low resolution, finicky optical sensors and becoming high resolution, incredibly accurate laser sensors that would work on any surface (even glass). Now recently it's near impossible to find a laser mouse, and instead the market is once again flooded with outdated optical mice. Why did we move backwards to an inaccurate technology we'd left behind?

>Nobody uses an old ball mouse on purpose" Me and the Compaq ball mouse next to me, simultaneously: "I took that personally"

The linear optical sensors in the MSC mouse _might_ be proprietary, but that type of sensor is used a lot in automated production lines to sense conveyor speed, product position on a conveyor, etc.

Standard Si photodiodes have their peak responsivity around 900 nm so IR makes sense for cost cutting since you can use lower power LEDs. It also means any ambient light will have less of an effect since they used filtered photodiodes (which adds no cost, just uses a different plastic).

Why don't just use accelerometers for mouses? This would work on ANY surface, even air. Also you could make it work in 3D space.

I’ve never seen someone try to explain an optical mouse without saying “optical flow” and instead calling it a weird trick that shouldn’t work. Quite interesting

Before you took of the case I thought they had put fiber optics and connected it to a regular ball mouse PCB, but was still shocked when they actually used fiber optics! Crazy design!

The ball mouse controller chip theory is interesting, I wonder if it would actually work if you temporarily wired the photocell pins of the chip to a regular ball mouse.

We had a lab with several machines that used the optical mouse with required pad - and to keep us from using them on off-hours, they would remove the mouse pads and lock them away. Necessity being the mother of invention, we found out that running the mouse over a jeans leg would produce motion, albeit jerky and difficult to control... but since nothing we were doing required much more accuracy than than pointing to buttons or click areas, we were back in business. 😂 👖 🖱 👍

Generic ODMs Zany Double Sensor Mouse! Also would like to add that I wouldn't want to imagine a world without zinc!

Someone did his homework. Nice vid. Personally i love optic mice since the day they came, though older models seem have lower resolution, i collect them nowadays because of the shape - all modern mice too small for my hand (and don't get me started on gamer mice with too many buttons that accidentaly hit objects, like keyboards, while operatin. i love the old fashioned button-on-top-design), so i'm actually considering retrofitting an old MS model with modern opticts. That all said, in my box i have a '3D' mouse (as in - works hovering in the air, capturing motion). Has PS/2 compatabilty. It sort of worked, but in practice lacked precision. Not (only) because of the mouse tended to drift into one of the corners on the screen while being idle, but more because it missed the tactile feedback. Quite sure it predates nintendo controllers with 3D sensors. But this vid, with this hack, made me curious again. Gonna dig. Will ship it to you if you are willing to ship it back. Regards.

I wouldn’t call it a master piece of cheapness. I consider it the highest form of ingenuity and thinking outside the box literally. That only a true master of creative thinking could accomplish. And I think a lot of companies would benefit from this kind of engineering.

When I used to work doing activations for T-Mobile, we had ball mice. I brought my own optical mouse in and after a week was told by IT I couldn't use it. This was around 15 years ago...but there is president for ball purists.

There's a possibility (remote) that those 3 holes could be some sort of manufacturing artifact like a test point or jig connection location. Excellent analysis!

I was one of the rare people who preferred ball mice - I got very used to using the inertia of the ball to flick the cursor around (which combined with ‘sloppy focus’ on Linux), and this was also integral to my Quake strategy. I’m still not fond of optical mice, and generally use trackballs whenever I can.

Making a product then allowing many other companies to brand and then resell your product is called “White Labeling” and right now China is especially good it. This is how many electronic/computer brands make accessories with their own brand on them without needed to design their own version. For some products like a mouse, keyboard, monitor, battery charger, and so forth you really don’t need to design your own version as the designs are very standard and a basic these days unless your wanting to add a special special feature/value-add and even then many white label products can be customized in limited forms with certain popular value-adds.

“Even though there’s only 100 lines, each one produces 4 state transitions”; you know, weirdly, this helped me get a handle on the principle behind QAM and other similar modulations which cram multiple bits into one state transition… it’s kinda sorta this but in reverse. And instead of double-sampling the lines with the sensors separated by a little space, it gets the extra “sampling” and “space” inside that complicated mathematical structure which always made me go “hmm ok it’s just magic” when looking into QAM before. I mean I’m sure that’s wrong in subtle ways but just seeing it in space as a real artefact let me get my head around how they can be not-always 1:1.

Wow what an amazing deconstruction of a piece of digital interfacing history, Now i suddenly respect my optical mouse even more!

Man I love the well researched old weird technology videos you make.

I kinda hate myself now for bothering with ball mice well into the 2000s.

HAHAHAHA "is there an adult here" my sides

Typically its 125 images per second. Gaming mice often increase that, mine does it 1000 times per second but its a decade old at this point. I've not really noticed much difference so maybe they're now doing it 250 or even 125 times a second for gaming mice too - why do something harder if nobody notices. But its a surprisingly low number regardless, yet still works great.

the 3 holes look like they like up with the three metal pads, my bet is they are used for testing

It's too bad that trackball "mouses" are no longer available. They were incomparably better for certain tasks, most notably image editing. It is so much more difficult to do anything that requires extreme tracking of subtle movements. The optical mouse is a major step down. Of course, it's far cheaper to make...

I’ve been using Macs since the early 90s and there were some interesting after market mice and trackballs by Kensington for the Mac but we didn’t think about it too hard. When Windows 3.x came out is when the hardware manufacturers lost their shit. Our CompUSA had a whole aisle devoted to mice. Sounds crazy now, but most PC users didn’t have to deal with mice in DOS. When Windows dropped it all changed.

Okay! My bad... I guess I should watch the ENTIRE video, before commenting; as you just said almost word for word, what I did in the comments! :) The Bus Mouse Systems had been making these for YEARS, in the late 80s and early 90s, for SGIs, SUN work stations, AutoCAD workstations, and the like. I have several of these Laser optical mice, with the metal and polycarbonate encoder pad... This Q500 design is basically an enlarged BCD optically encoder, with a large pad, instead of a small circular encoder wheel. Now if you want to research a truly cool technical design, look into the original 80s and 90s RF AutoCAD digitisers, and mouse graphics tablet pads. Look into the original WATCOM and Quantel Paintbox graphics tablets. They were originally wired pens and digitised pucks and then changed to the RF tuned circuit induction X/Y system.

With this mouse, it seems as though you could control the input by changing the layout of the lines. You could print a linear "mousepad" with lines of calculated thicknesses where dragging the mouse across at a constant speed does a set of specific mouse movements.

In the late '80s, the high schooler that I was became the owner of a Logitech C7 mechanical-optical serial mouse! It was $180CAD at Radio Shack! :-) Back then, everyone had the less advanced Microsoft mechanical-electrical mouse...

The mouse knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the mouse from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

This was pretty interesting. Not exploring weird mice too much myself, I was using cheapy OEM ball mice until like 2010, a cheap wireless optical mouse for a bit, and then been on laser gaming mice ever since. While I like the idea of a sniper button, I constantly forget to make any use of it. I do manually turn DPI up and down sometimes midgame though, like cranking it up for tanks in Battlefield, or down for weird old games that freak out at high DPI.

The '90s were such a weird time when it came to input devices. There was a big street sale near downtown Dallas many years ago called the First Saturday Sale, and I remember buying all sorts of weird mice, trackpads, and "pen-mice" for pocket change. All the bizarre, unwanted technology you could ever want, laid out on card tables in a parking lot. That's where I bought my BeOS package (that would only freeze my Mac even though it was supposed to be compatible), lots of Amiga mice, Atari Portfolio accessories, laserdiscs, Bandai Pippin keyboards and modems, and so many trash Mac CD-ROM games made with Adobe Shockwave. Sigh. Those were the days.

I had a Mouse Systems A+ optical mouse for an apple Mac+ back in about 1990. Compared to the roller-ball dirt-collecting mice, it was fantastic, except it required a special pad filled with reflective line in both directions.

The part number id DMP3-SR. That's an audio chip. It seems to be an analogue discriminator, probably used to separate the left and right audio channels.

This was the only mouse/pad I was given to use when I was doing CAD work for a startup. I was 'using up' a pad every three weeks or so! I was wiping the pad down with acetone or ethanol...had to keep it clean! The faint stripes are what the mouse 'sees'; I though they were decorative.

I remember a mouse like that in the mid-90s. The local library had one of those attached to one of the Macs in the kids' section. No idea why it was there. I now assume the old mouse had the ball stolen, and this is what they replaced it with. Never saw another optical mouse for years, until high-school.

I suspect these were supposed to be for graphics designers - usually you saw them sold with an optical pen, a mouse and some bizarro mouse with a magnifying glass with crosshairs for going over blueprints very accurately.

Not saying that modern mice era bad, but cleaning the ball was the best thing too do while waiting for anything to load or install. Stupidly satisfying. Meh, I use a trackball now, so not like I am missing on the experience.

i dunno, it was kinda satisfying removing those little compressed dust bands from the mouseball rollers..and getting that last spot that made you open it again. better than bubble wrap. (who remembers the debates about if it made a difference to clean the spring roller too 😂)

I remember my Mouse Systems mouse that used it's special pad. It came with a copy of AutoSketch. From what I remember I liked the mouse but hated the limited size of the pad. Good memories.

i feel like the reason few consumers had the three button sun mice is because they were probably marketed towards practical applications. i imagine you could probably go to a machine shop somewhere where there's still a cnc mill controlled by a computer cart that has one of the reflective mouse pads stuck down on it with double sided tape.

2:50 Fun fact, the Mars Helicopter doesn't have GPS to tell it where it is or how far and in what direction it is moving so it uses a more complex version of this method that takes altitude over the surface into account as part of it's navigation system along with some angle sensors and accelerometers.

There must be some small community who believe ball mice are superior in some way... Although I remember having to spend so much time having to clean lint out of them.

It was when you said "no specialised components" that it truly dawned on me. Brb, gonna go get some fiber optic cable and retrofit all my old ball mice to optical.

I had a serial mouse systems mouse for my XT back in the day and I got it for free because it's owner didn't like the way it tracked. Indeed as I recall you had to use it at right angles only.

this was way more interesting than I expected. I'm glad I stuck around for the reveal! I wonder if you are wrong about how the decoding works, though. You suggest that it's basically a binary threshold and the hardware just counts black/white transitions. That would be very low resolution. Instead, if they measured the relative intensity of the light reflected into the two fiber optic strands you would get a sinewave signal out of a square wave source, and could actually pick up the phase of the sensor's position within a single pair of white and black lines, since the intensity of the light reflected back into the strand would depend on how close to the center of the line that strand was. The test is simple: does the mouse move in a jerky stairstep way when slowly pushed very slowly over the pad?