Who's responsible for the optical mouse? (it's not Xerox) 

yelling and swearing and throwing things? ive never been more excited for a CRD video

MouseJet probably comes from the rest of HP's naming of things… like LaserJet, DeskJet, ScanJet, JetDirect, etc.

You're such a natural at talking to an audience you can't see. It doesn't sound or feel like you're reading a script like even the top tier tubers do. Don't ever stop, not until you're rich, or tired of making videos. Subbed.

Nice Amogus Amiga shirt. The optical mouse was a huge deal. I'm a retro grouch when it comes to a lot of old crap, computers, cars, etc...but there are two things in that realm that are truly just unacceptable that they didn't come out sooner: intermittent windshield wipers, and optical mice. EDIT: I mean optical mice FOR THE MASSES. Just like the entire video was talking about.

I think you did a great job pointing out the distinction between "who first" versus "who practical", especially when it involves swerving the technology. Same with TV, Brits (and Scots especially) will scream Baird invented TV, sure he invented _a_ TV but not _the_ TV, and that sells Baird short.

I was a daily user of a Sun Microsystems optical mouse (Xerox-style) with the metal mouse pad. I always wondered why it took so many years for the mouse on my PC to go optical. This all makes so much more sense to me now.

When I was studying I.T. at college the system support guy (who was notoriously highly strung & wore wooden clogs) decided to glue the ball retaining ring thing on every mouse because he was annoyed that students would constantly remove the balls and scrape the rollers. Barely a week passed before the first 12" CRT went through a window.

I love that we've now had enough videos about mice to make a pretty extensive playlist. I love these deep dives into topics that seem trivial and unimportant to most people, because I enjoy collecting somewhat unusual bits of trivia.

Awesome! I had a first gen optical mouse and did struggle with it in games, but I still loved it simply because I didn’t have to clean it. I didn’t struggle with ball mice like you though. I found that using a textured mouse pad and simply cleaning the pad periodically cut down on accumulation of junk inside the ball mouse meaning it was not often I had to clean my mouse rollers. And I agree about the old Xerox design. It was terrible and doesn’t seem related. I had one of these mice and it stunk. Not only did you need to use the small grid mouse pad, but if the mouse became rotated slightly on the pad it would stop working. It had two sensors, one handling X movement and the other Y … and since it had felt pads on the underside, it didn’t even slide that nicely over the metal reflective pad versus a ball mouse with Teflon pads on the underside. I quickly abandoned it and went back to a ball mouse. There was definitely a novelty to it being optical but the trade offs were not worth it versus the occasional cleaning a ball mouse required.

I really enjoy how you get down to brass tacks and avoid pedantry while still understanding pedantry. It's an incredible skill and I love it.

Now I'm too scared to look up where Logitech's "Invisible Eye" sensor came from, which in my option was the "Optical Mouse v2" but I'm guessing also came from a random lab full of guys just tossing around ideas of 50 year old physics

I really appreciate the disclaimer at the beginning. Some days, I just can't handle that energy. Thankfully today is not one of those days :)

My experience with ball mice was not so bad. I recall opening it up to clean on rare occasion, but was not constantly bothered by it clogging up like some people here.

I have a Mouse Systems optical mouse, which came from a CAD workstation in a college, where they had a room full of PCs equipped with them in the early '90s. I'm sure they were a niche product, but they certainly weren't unheard of in the '80s and '90s. I did see them, and their matching mouse pad with a grid pattern on it, at computer shows and in magazines at the time. I think they were about as common as the Microsoft InPort bus mouse -- most computer users never owned one, but knew they existed. p.s. I'm using a ball mouse right now, and I only have to clean it maybe once every 2 or 3 years. I think they got a bad reputation because when they were popular, a lot more people used to smoke, and even did so at their desk while using their computer. Even today, if you look at the mouse and mouse pad of a smoker, it is filthy and discolored. So it's no wonder that caused problems with ball mice.

You are such a good storyteller, there is so much passion here. I don't really care if all the tiny details are perfect in this one, getting the story across mattered more.

I loved this video. It's similar to one I saw a week or so ago from Defunctland about the Disney Channel identification theme and who composed it...They did a deep dive into copyrights, and interviewed loads of people who had worked with Disney, or the companies that worked with Disney, around the time the theme premiered. They finally got the composer his due and ended up playing his music throughout the video. It was brilliantly done. Your video, while a different tone, showed the same frustration and need to get to the bottom of things and accurately explain the real history of optical mouse, essentially giving the inventors their due recognition. Well done!

I don't know how common it was, but back when I was in school and we'd use a hand scanner (since that was the only one the school could afford), there was a piece of thin aluminium plate with a slightly sticky surface on one side that we'd put under the documents or book page we'd want to scan. Worked pretty well, or at least it made scanning possible, if not convenient or easy.

This is probably my new favorite video of yours. It feels like you're at the top of your game presentation-wise here. You so concisely fit so much into nearly 30 minutes and delivered it so smoothly that it felt like only 10 minutes. You had me hooked in, start to finish. Always a treat watching your stuff.

I have a cat and a dog, both shed enough to turn my house into a fur coat factory. I got an old ball mouse for my retro rig and I can't use it for more than 2 minutes after cleaning it before it starts tracking like shit. When I got it, I felt nostalgic. That quickly faded and now it sits in storage. You're right about them being revolutionary though! I was absolutely fascinated by optical mice by the time we started getting them back in the day. What an amazing thing

15:53 "I have seen image tracking in the Navy". I love how the whole Palo Alto "scene" is basically all spooks, informants and military. who got young bill bates his first government contract? what was young Chomsky up to researching the ur-language at mit (for military use voice input systems)? etc etc

I was admittedly a bit late switching to optical mice; I was pretty diligent about keeping my wheels and surfaces clean so I usually had pretty good tracking with my ball mice, and at the time I was using some of Logitech's early wireless models and the first optical sensors were power-hungry enough that you got much better battery life out of the ball versions. Another fringe benefit is that ball mice will move/shift the cursor in a predictable way if you lift the mouse, and the cursor will shift back in nearly the same way when placing the mouse back down. When moving quickly (especially in gaming), this can be significant in terms of how it shifts your point of aim, and when you're used to a particular ball mouse you can more easily keep the cursor where you expect it across mouse lifts. Optical mice by comparison (especially early ones) produce pretty wild and unpredictable jitter when lifting the mouse, so every time you pick up the mouse it's a random walk by the time you place it back down, putting your cursor somewhere you don't expect. This all mattered quite a bit more in the early days when most mice were 400dpi, but these days the sensors are high enough DPI that you don't need to lift the mouse as often and modern sensors tend to stop and start tracking with much less jitter as you lift the mouse anyway.

A video about trackballs would be neat, esentially giant upside down ball mice but theyve got funky bearings and sensors now.

I remember my first experiences with optical mice as a twelve year old. They felt light and flimsy, and were very fussy about surface quality. There's not much you can do about a fraying, peeling mousepad with torn edges, but the old ball mouse can be carefully cleaned.

The motion control TV remote mouse concept is one which persists today in the form of $8 stuff from AliExpress - I own a couple, in fact. Bought them mainly for having a remote to control volume and pause media on my Windows PC from the couch, but the mouse isn't all that bad. They incur a surprising amount of wrist pain and can be frankly miserable to use for more than a few seconds, but if you need a mouse quickly they serve their purpose. I've found myself tossing one in my pocket to go to the server room a few times - the ones I have have a full QWERTY keyboard on the back. Neither necessary nor practical, but slightly interesting.

Logitech's Trackman Marble trackball uses a similar optical setup, but tracking the dotted surface of the ball. It first came out in 1995, so the potential WAS there even earlier. I'm surprised it took another 4-5 years for companies to apply the concept to simply tracking the surface that the mouse is on.

The original Xerox style optical mouse was really popular with graphic designers, I have a novelty t shirt somewhere with a mouse and pad saying "from my cold dead hands"

I definitely enjoyed this, even though I tend to disagree about the importance of first concept provers even though they wouldn’t be known without the later mass production devisers. The opinion piece tone was nice for a shorter subject piece as well, as much as I enjoy your more-factual ones. Citing the interviews still was a nice touch as well

I bought an Intellieye back in 99 and absolutely loved it. I used it for over 20 years until the switch for the left click finally failed.

Interesting video - I remember first using an optical mouse - it was in 1991 and on a Sun workstation. It needed a special mouse mat made from a fine metal mesh that it 'look' at to work out how it was moving. Spent the next 10+ years working with PCs and cleaning the crap out of ball mice. Always wondered what the missing link (or not, in this case) between Sun's mice and the Intellimouse (the first PC optical mouse I saw) was. Now I know - thanks!

I’ve always appreciated your passion for the video topics you take on. This kind of indignation and from-the-heart presentation is another facet I wasn’t expecting! A surprise, but a welcome one. It honestly made me stop and ponder the mice I’ve used over the years, and why using a ball mouse recently just felt so awkward…

You! Swearing? Never! In all seriousness, I welcome these kinds of opinion videos. Every video maker needs to make videos that purely exist to vent sometimes.

I love all the effort you put into your content, great work!

Your presentation of the subject, whatever the subject is so engaging, why some network has not snapped you up is perplexing! Thank you.

I owned a Mouse Systems optical mouse for my PCjr. I remember it included PC Paintbrush for around $99 back in 86. It was very affordable.

So crazy how fast your channel has grown, and deservedly so!

I LOVE how passionate you were about this invention! Keep them coming like this! I might even go as far as to say this might be your best video to date. Great job sir! Great job indeed.

In 1999 I think, in collage, I bought a $300 ish handheld scanner which was the size of a delayed release insulin pen. It had a few LCD lines which would show you the text it scanned. It only scanned text BTW. It saved me countless library book rentals as I could scan in the library. It had a image to text option too. You could then delete the image and free up a lot of space.

The infomercial bit stunned me. Never stop making high-effort meme bits even in the ranty videos.

Travis Blalock was a professor at the University of Virginia after HP. If you were a student there around 2000, you might have heard him give presentations about what went into the design of this chip. I remember he gave this presentation to our Intro to Engineering class. To do the amount of error correlation calculations that the scanning chip did on the size and amount of samples needed to make it work, required an extraordinary number of flops; nothing that a CPU at the time could have done. It needed to be an ASIC. To get the die size managably small enough and the power low enough, there were custom logic gates in each processing cell. Cutting edge stuff at the time. A super-computer's worth of processing power condensed into a commodity mouse and the only news about it existed in some college slides.

I've rewatched this video a couple of times now, and it's still as good as the first view! Your ability to relay this story of mice to your camera in a very engaging manner is unparalleled. Keep up the grand work, comrade.

This is my favorite Cathode Ray Dude video to date. It was honestly refreshing to hear your opinion on this topic that i'd never thought about before. Good on you.

oh my god my flatbed is the size of a stereo receiver i didn't know they got that small. If only they made tabloid-size ones

I remember the first time I used an optical mouse. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The thing fucking GLIDED though the table. Smooth movement, you never had to clean it, and also the red light coming from below looked cool as hell. It blows my mind companies quietly got them into market, like they were ashamed of what they were selling.

Great video Gravis. Love your work and nice to hear some opinions!

these videos bring me up. Love your passion and your great articulation of ideas. Another banger

I love your content and how passionate about it you are- also you are such a huggable looking human bean.

I'm surprised this isn't one of your most viewed videos, love the passion behind it, the history, the craziness that we could have had optical mice earlier! Thanks for mentioning this video bombed, in one of your latest ones, would have never searched it out otherwise. :D

Sir, I absolutely love pretty much all of your videos. I love the stuff you cover basically all of it, and I enjoy your style and presentation and watching you improve (your words I believe lol) ..... I wish I could support you more, but I hope some good words and appreciation will suffice for the time being.... You really have become one of my favorites to see a new video from, doesn't really matter to read what it's over, I'll be amused, entertained and oh my, maybe learn a few things along the way.... Throw in some good tunes and I'd call it a good day 🙃 keep up the good work and be safe!!

Your presentation to camera on this video is stellar, well done!

I really like your thoughts on things, so thanks for sharing them!

I remember when the MS was bringing out the first Intellimouse and being blown away by the "infra-red" technology. I'd go through ball mice almost yearly. When I got the Intellimouse Optical (the one with side buttons) I used that until the left mouse button lost its plastic texture and switch under it started to fail. I have in the meantime picked up one of the original Intellimouses as well as a small number of other early optical mice like the Apple Pro mouse. However I still use the original ball mice on my Amiga and Atari ST.

It is nuts how even my zoomer ass has years of experience with the dreaded ball mice, they were everywhere well into the 2000s. Really overstayed their welcome

I like your calm essays but I also love it when we see your passion

This is probably one of my favorite videos you've made. History is written by the victors, not the pretend ones on a technicality. I think you did justice to the real inventors of the optical mouse.

The first PC my parents bought in 1989 had a Mouse Systems optical mouse, so I must find myself very lucky then. I still have it to this day because I always thought it was so neat. I wonder how my dad was convinced to buy the mouse when purchasing the PC. I'm sure at that time the cost was far less than the $300ish price point quoted in the video because he never would have paid that much, knowing him...

i love your passion. keep up the fantastic work my dude.

I remember those HP laser printers with IrDA, at the time I had a Nokia 6210i with IrDA and tried to send a contact (business card) to the printer. It actually printed the name and number and then locked up and no one else on the network could print to it until it was power cycled.

Don't give up. I fell asleep to this and it was so nice. Will wait for next vid !

Yes! Was just watching your other videos . Saw the thumbnail and was like huh I didn’t see that before…then I see “uploaded 5 minutes ago” , damn!

This has to be one of your best videos so far!

Im all about this energy, love it. Also super interesting because i always credited Xerox with the optical mouse and its really interesting to see that the sensor that actually got us to the optical mouse came out of a scanner from HP.

Great opinion piece. I'm right there with you, I think the implementation of an idea that actually gets used is the note worthy one. Kind o reminds me of something I read I think from stranger in a strange land. Once you fully understand an idea, it becomes yours.

18:15 is such a wild shot. That level of extra is exactly what I've come to expect. Gorgeous video as always.

I really like this style of video from you!

My first optical mouse was for my Amiga back in 1993. It was one of types that came with a specialized mouse pad. It worked pretty well. Alpha Data brand that came out in 1992! Around $60 or $80 if I recall. Should work with Atari’s too. Golden Image also made a 3-Button optical for Amiga and Atari with a switch. For around the same price. Your video is mostly correct. Both the above mice were commonly Available in smaller computer stores. It was a premium item but not “100s of dollars” although yes I guess they would be if you apply inflation. The famous MS mouse based on the HP design is SECOND GEN or a MKII of the optical mouse era. It’s kind of like how a lot of people think Street Fighter II is just “the first real Street Fighter.” Since the first was so bad. Heh. No, it’s the second. Even though as second it’s the one that actually succeeded. Much like your comparison to Henry Ford.

I watched this great video yesterday. Today, while somehow falling down the rabbit hole of sewing machines, I discovered that some modern sewing machines use modified versions of these optical mouse sensors to detect fabric movement, so that they can adjust the stitch automatically. (Apparently useful in things like quilting, where the fabric is moved by hand rather than by the ordinary feed mechanism.) I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also used to detect asymmetrical movement in thick fabrics or stacks of fabrics, to detect when the top isn’t moving at the same speed as the bottom, causing unwanted bunching or whatever. Modern high end machines supposedly can adjust automatically, maybe this is part of how they do it. One sensor is in the base of the machine, looking at the underside of the fabric, the other built into the presser foot, looking at the top. (Older-style machines, like my mom’s Husqvarna, use a rotary encoder on the presser foot, to measure distance to allow automatic repeat button holes, for example. I bet those use optical encoders just like in old ball mice.)

I had a Palm III, I still have it. I adored it for taking notes in classes.

That is a picture of a variant of HP 2200 Laserjet that is still in my home printing two-sided sheets, its solenoid pads replaced, cracked plastic glued and rotating mirror lubricated with the oil for the electric hair cutter. HP 2100 is even more resilient beast but without USB port. BTW, although it says "HP", it is a throughbred Canon inside.

I really, really love this video and your attitude towards primacy in inventions. (I will say my first optical mouse was in 1989 on my Apple //c, with Mouse Systems and their reflective mousepad mouse - probably $99 or $129)

Back in the 90s, I worked with some Sun Workstations that had those awful optical mice. Not only did you have to use the special surface for the mouse, if you held the mouse at an angle on the pad, it wouldn't work anymore until you reoriented it to be straight up. The ball mice were an improvement over those early optical mice.

Great job man! Throw this format in the mix sometimes.

There is a pleasing full-circle in the details there. The HP guys seemed to allude to their "air mouse" idea tracking the user's room *visually*. That has come to fruition in the VR market as "inside-out tracking".

This might be the best video you’ve created. I ❤ this!!!!!

Very enlightening. I am still getting the creeps remembering how much of a chore it's been getting rid of that filth that built up inside of a mechanical mouse, and it was usually always necessary to do that in the midst of a gaming session at a LAN party which sucked AF

I don't miss ball mice. I had no idea the source for the mass market optical mouse but I hadn't bothered to look into it before watching your video which saved me the effort.

Great vid!! I had one of the xerox and one of the sun optical mice. They were neat at the time but such a pain to use because of the special mouse pad needed. Was thrilled when we ended up with optical mice for the masses. Bugged the hell out of me that it took what seemed forever for the Amiga to end up with optical mice.

That mouse ball extraction and throw into the other hand was flawless and a priceless demo of having it done hundreds of times!

Interesting video. Loving it. Sad to hear how HP never really got their credit.

Sun also had a optical/laser mouse. It needed special mousepad though. Shiny reflective metal with printed black grid, and once it wore out you had to replace it, or it worked really janky. If you printed a grid on paper it would also sort of worked. So between the Xerox mouse, and this one, there was Sun. Cheaper than Xerox, but still workstation pricing. Used it in college computer lab back in the day. So the MS mouse was probably at keast third optical mouse to come along.

Using a ball mouse is like trying to control a 1950's pickup truck with loose steering.

GREAT video CRD :) Best from London

I was 4 years old in 1999, I remember using an Intellimouse Explorer on my grandma's computer in the very early 2000s, and still using the cheap ball mouse that came with the other computers I was using, I didn't realize optical mice as we know them were really that new.

My LG TV has a remote that acts as a gyro mouse. I love that interface. So much more intuitive and faster than those menu based systems. This actually was a major reason for the choice of TV brand for me.

Can you provide a reference for the research paper shown at 17:41? I have been curious how optical mouse sensors work at a fundamental level but my searching has not yielded results. Thanks!

Just watched Vwestlife's new video on portable scanners, and was curious - I adore your frustrated irritation here!

@[CRD] You should really continue on the topic of mice with one more topic: Mouse wheels on top of it. I remember a Mouse with 2 wheels branded/manufactured A4tech. Very practical in large Excel sheets to scroll horizontally and vertically with those two wheels. I even removed the brake of those wheels to allow a faster continuous spinning of those wheels. This was like in a Radio, which had a weight on the axis of the tuning dail, to allow a faster movement between frequencies on the other end of the frequency scale. And adding a weight inside a kind of a portable Hifisystem Telefunken M1Studio is not a good a idea on a first thought, but the feel while turning the dail feels really good. Fujitsu had a mouse with a little TouchPad on top of the mouse. That sounded more intuitive for using, but that was far less ergonomic to use.

Do you have any mdview discs you would maybe part ways with? I recently acquired the camcorder at the swap meet and would like to fully test it.

What a great video. My grandfather had a scanner sort of like these that claimed to be able to scan anything, any size. It was small enough to be handheld but it had to stay connected to the computer with a cable. It's trick was that it was motorized and would roll itself along the page. I hope you already see the problem. As it would roll itself along the page, when it got to the end of its cord, it would either stop and give an error or the page would start sliding underneath it as the wheels pulled on it. It's hard to explain. It was awful. I'll just say that. I tried finding a picture of one but what search terms do I even use to try and find it?

So you do mind if I skip other videos for other reasons? There was software to turn your optical mouse into this at one point, and it worked pretty well iirc. I never got to use it.

Epic rant. I remember when everything switched over and with such little fanfair. Think the reason nobody really gave it much thought because the MP3 came out at the same time as well as other important tech like USB. Everything was changing so fast we never got a chance to realize how important the upgrade really was.

8 minutes into the video and I'm already on the edge of my seat. Good stuff. Edit: I MUST know where can I find one of those Amiga/Amogus shirts. Please.

Ball mice were still widely used at schools and companies in the mid 00's (along with incredibly old CRTs). I'd imagine this stems from multi year license agreements and piles of old stock which would otherwise be stuck in warehouses.

Your rant about Xerox not doing anything with the superior optical mouse they had and forcing us to endure ball mice for decades reminds me of how I feel about the rewind/fast-forward paradigm for audio and video playback. The rewind and fast-forward paradigm was a necessity of the medium with tape. With dis(c|k)-based storage, you get random access (and flash memory takes it to the extreme by lacking seek times). Want to listen to the last track on the side of an LP? Just put down the needle at the start of the track. A good CD player might let you type in the track number to play, and even a crappy one will at least let you step through the track numbers by repeatedly pressing "Next track". DVDs and Blue-rays have menus and chapters, and of course, most file systems assume random access as a given. And yet, with the exception of the record player, those dedicated audio and video playback devices force the use of the rewind/fast-forward paradigm within a track/chapter/file. If you're lucky you might be able to type in a time index, which while usually clunky, is still a better UI than rewind/fast-forward. Hell, being able to jump forward or backwards a few seconds is a better UI than rewind/fast-forward, and few devices provide even that. What makes for a good UI for audio and video playback is something computer playback programs have offered for decades: the seek bar. Click on the bar and it jumps to that time index. Gone too far or not far enough? Just click to the appropriate side of where it is now. It makes jumping around quick and easy. Especially when paired with keyboard shortcuts for jumping a few seconds forwards or backwards. And yet, it's only available on computers and computer-like devices such as smartphones. Dedicated devices just don't offer it. It's like everyone who designs them still thinks they're working with VHS or compact cassette. It's infuriating. We can do better. We DO do better. Except when it comes to dedicated devices. Then we suddenly get amnesia for the existence of anything other than tape.

Love this format, more rants please

I probably haven't thought about it in several years, but this video made me remember the first optical mouse I ever got. It was a GE brand mouse with some ridiculous number of extra buttons (you know, like five, maybe it was seven? doesn't matter, most of them didn't do anything useful) and a SCROLL WHEEL. My god, after having grown up with ball mice, it was a complete and utter revolution. Considering that this must have been around 2002/2003 and I kept that mouse for close to a decade, that was easily the best $17.99 I ever spent on a piece of computer tech. I'm sure that by today's standards, or even a decade ago's standards, it was complete and utter garbage; but I will never forget how that cheesy silver and red mouse wiped the floor so thoroughly with anything else I had ever used. In short, you're absolutely right, Xerox did absolutely nothing for the common user in the optical mouse area. It was HP and the H2000, which it wouldn't surprise me if that's the exact sensor that was in that old GE I had.

Great stuff. I knew about Microsoft coming out with the first "real" optical mouse and I've even used the Mouse Systems Sun variety when I was an intern at JPL in college, and you're totally right that they're not really at all related. I do remember buying a cheap knock-off of the Mouse Systems style of optical mouse with the special grid pad for my Amiga toward the end of its lifetime and that was probably a rare peripheral since I haven't seen it mentioned on any retro videos I've watched. What I didn't know was that Xerox was behind the Mouse Systems mouse and HP behind the IntelliEye patent and ASIC.

great as usual. I mean, art, gaming, even music production, definitely the mouse hell of video editing... imagine any of this now with a nasty ball rolling around, just ow and ew.

This is more fascinating than I thought. Thanks.

"warning this one is a rant you might want to skip it" *grabs popcorn and straps in*

Now I'm curious, are there any good solutions for scanning documents using a video feed of a phone camera.