LGR Oddware - Mouse Systems 1986 Optical PC Mouse
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Frank
I had this mouse when it first came out. I actually liked it better than several generations of ball mice. To me the big advantage was the weight of the mouse itself. It made for much less wrist strain, especially doing CAD work for 40 hours a week which is likely why Sun selected it for their systems. Later, when people started using mouse pads to improve their ball mouse performance and accuracy the -mouse pad- the Mouse Systems used begun to look pretty normal. I kept mine alive for years until, for some strange reason it just stopped working. One major issue with the special -mouse pad- occurred if you scratched it. Depending on how badly it got scratched the mouse would essentially become unusable. I was lucky enough to get free -mouse pads- from other users back then so kept me going. It wasn-t until Microsoft introduced the first true optical mice that, for me, was a superior user experience. I hated having to clean the -shmoo- out of all those ball mice. EWWWW!
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I had this mouse when it first came out. I actually liked it better than several generations of ball mice. To me the big advantage was the weight of the mouse itself. It made for much less wrist strain, especially doing CAD work for 40 hours a week which is likely why Sun selected it for their systems. Later, when people started using mouse pads to improve their ball mouse performance and accuracy the -mouse pad- the Mouse Systems used begun to look pretty normal. I kept mine alive for years until, for some strange reason it just stopped working. One major issue with the special -mouse pad- occurred if you scratched it. Depending on how badly it got scratched the mouse would essentially become unusable. I was lucky enough to get free -mouse pads- from other users back then so kept me going. It wasn-t until Microsoft introduced the first true optical mice that, for me, was a superior user experience. I hated having to clean the -shmoo- out of all those ball mice. EWWWW!
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Tetsujin
4: 29 - Kind of makes sense when you consider PC serial ports weren't actually made to deliver power to devices - and of course this was before PS/2 mice and USB mice. Though, man, never really thought about PC mice in the days before DB9 serial ports were the norm.
Before I even owned a PC, back when I was still on Commodore stuff, I saw this mouse in catalogs and lusted after it. Still seems pretty cool!
Though. yeah, the special mouse pad. I remember that being a thing, too. Didn't know it was that finnicky though. I remember when modern optical mice first appeared, I was like, whoa, without the special mosepad now? Just on any surface? . And to be honest I was kind of skeptical. XD
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4: 29 - Kind of makes sense when you consider PC serial ports weren't actually made to deliver power to devices - and of course this was before PS/2 mice and USB mice. Though, man, never really thought about PC mice in the days before DB9 serial ports were the norm.
Before I even owned a PC, back when I was still on Commodore stuff, I saw this mouse in catalogs and lusted after it. Still seems pretty cool!
Though. yeah, the special mouse pad. I remember that being a thing, too. Didn't know it was that finnicky though. I remember when modern optical mice first appeared, I was like, whoa, without the special mosepad now? Just on any surface? . And to be honest I was kind of skeptical. XD
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TheSteelRodent
I went to a school in 1993 where a lot of the (older) computers still didn't have mice, but then in between all the keyboard only computers were a couple that had one of these old optical mice. I remember the mice being absolutely terrible and if the special mouse pad got slightly dirty the mouse went completely nuts. Don't know if they were any good when they were new, but at least at that point they were awful and much harder to use than the ball mice
Also what I recall is that MS Paint is based on Zsoft Paintbrush, which in turn was based on MacPaint, but then we're talking about the 80s where we had a ton of programs called 'paint' something and it's easy to get them mixed up
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I went to a school in 1993 where a lot of the (older) computers still didn't have mice, but then in between all the keyboard only computers were a couple that had one of these old optical mice. I remember the mice being absolutely terrible and if the special mouse pad got slightly dirty the mouse went completely nuts. Don't know if they were any good when they were new, but at least at that point they were awful and much harder to use than the ball mice
Also what I recall is that MS Paint is based on Zsoft Paintbrush, which in turn was based on MacPaint, but then we're talking about the 80s where we had a ton of programs called 'paint' something and it's easy to get them mixed up
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Fran-ois
Sun SPARC workstation still had those type of mice not too long ago. They work very differently than the current ones (which use small cameras. They use two different LEDs and photo-receptors, one in the red spectrum, and one in infra-red I think (which is why you only see one lighten up on the video, and the lines on the mat have different colors to each block the specific light. Which is why they don't work if you rotate the mouse: D Actually, they aren't that different from the ball mice, they both count light pulses caused by beam interruptions, either by the wheels inside moved by the ball, or by the lines on the mat when you move it.
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Sun SPARC workstation still had those type of mice not too long ago. They work very differently than the current ones (which use small cameras. They use two different LEDs and photo-receptors, one in the red spectrum, and one in infra-red I think (which is why you only see one lighten up on the video, and the lines on the mat have different colors to each block the specific light. Which is why they don't work if you rotate the mouse: D Actually, they aren't that different from the ball mice, they both count light pulses caused by beam interruptions, either by the wheels inside moved by the ball, or by the lines on the mat when you move it.
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wayne
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.
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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.
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Steve
I had one of these mice (Mouses) when I was a kid, except mine was a bit more streamlined and ergonomic, and was for a Macintosh, and so had an ADB port (Which also meant no power supply needed, as the ADB port supplied the power, unlike serial. I'd been racking my brain lately trying to remember who made that thing. I've never seen another one out there. I do remember I used it so much that the plating started to rub off the metal. And putting the mouse on my CRT screen caused the curser to move to one corner (I was a kid at the time, no idea how I had the idea to try that)
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I had one of these mice (Mouses) when I was a kid, except mine was a bit more streamlined and ergonomic, and was for a Macintosh, and so had an ADB port (Which also meant no power supply needed, as the ADB port supplied the power, unlike serial. I'd been racking my brain lately trying to remember who made that thing. I've never seen another one out there. I do remember I used it so much that the plating started to rub off the metal. And putting the mouse on my CRT screen caused the curser to move to one corner (I was a kid at the time, no idea how I had the idea to try that)
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doomguy
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.
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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.
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Atomicskull
I had one of these around 1888 until the early 90's, smoothest most accurate mouse I have ever used and that includes the Intellimouse Pro with a pixart 3389 sensor I recently acquired which is very good, but not as quite as smooth and accurate as this ancient optical mouse based on a completely different branch of optical mouse technology. What happened to it is that the surface of the pad wore down and without that the mouse was useless, and replacements weren't available anymore.
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I had one of these around 1888 until the early 90's, smoothest most accurate mouse I have ever used and that includes the Intellimouse Pro with a pixart 3389 sensor I recently acquired which is very good, but not as quite as smooth and accurate as this ancient optical mouse based on a completely different branch of optical mouse technology. What happened to it is that the surface of the pad wore down and without that the mouse was useless, and replacements weren't available anymore.
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Stephen
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.
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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.
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fanjoy
The Sun workstation version wasn't just one version. There were at least two. The mouse pad grid was a different pitch with each of these two versions, so you could not swap mouse pads between mice, it just would not work unless it had the right pad. Also, if the pad got bent in any way then its feet would not hit the desk and it could move/spin annoyingly.
The Sun version also had the cool Sun logo on the mouse but not the track pad.
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The Sun workstation version wasn't just one version. There were at least two. The mouse pad grid was a different pitch with each of these two versions, so you could not swap mouse pads between mice, it just would not work unless it had the right pad. Also, if the pad got bent in any way then its feet would not hit the desk and it could move/spin annoyingly.
The Sun version also had the cool Sun logo on the mouse but not the track pad.
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