I had the PC Mouse II. My dad's company sold office equipment and supplies and got it as a sample. It was wild to see and use it the first time - NO BALL and NO FRICTION. I was the envy of all my friends. I used that thing for a good 15 years with no issues. I had it attached to my XT, 386, 486. Pentiums, Celeron computers and basically used it until modern optical mouse became common. I still have it and works great attached to any of my retro computers.

@fordesponja

2 ай бұрын

Are you still using the same mousepad?

@neil2402

2 ай бұрын

Yep, same here. I used it for probably the same amount of time over many generations of PCs. Avoided the ball-mouse era. Pad still works fine after all those years.

@andrewb9830

2 ай бұрын

@@fordesponja Yup. Still works great only had to re-glue the rubber bottom pad back on a corner. The pad was actually the only draw back on the PC Mouse II. It's quite smaller. And that was one thing new people to the mouse had to get use to was you didn't have to or have the space to go running off in all directions like a ball mouse. You had to stay on the pad. So I got use to smaller wrist motions then some people had with ball mice and whole forearm movements.

For the younger people, this kind of mouse was called a bus mouse (one with an addon card) to differentiate from a serial mouse (standard RS232.) The setup program most likely wanted to know if you had a hard drive to know if it could suggest that IRQ as being free.

'lifetime warranty".....wonder how that would be handled today!

@gigaherz_

2 ай бұрын

usually with a footnote "Lifetime* Warranty" "* Warranty valid only during the natural lifetime of the device."

@_MasterLink_

2 ай бұрын

Their lifetime usually, not our lifetime. That's how it's best been described to me which of course makes sense, if the company isn't even in business anymore.

@MK-ge2mh

2 ай бұрын

It’s not even based on the expected lifetime of the device. It’s for as long as the company is still manufacturing that or a comparable model. So a lifetime warranty on a 5 TB SSD might only be six months to a year. Each state can require a minimum time like 90 days as well.

@scott8919

2 ай бұрын

​@@MK-ge2mhthe lifetime of a model's run, basically.

@belstar1128

2 ай бұрын

@@gigaherz_ most of these 80s tech companies were lucky to last for more than a few years

17:40 Settlers II could use two mice. It had split screen mode for two players. It was bizarre seeing two cursors.

@cabbelos

2 ай бұрын

It was a whole adventure on its own to get it to run and not have both mice controlling the player 1 cursor. I think one had to be a PS/2 mouse and one had to be a serial mouse, and you should not load the serial mouse driver to get it to control the player 2 cursor. We spent so much time getting that to work before we realized there is no way to not be looking at your opponent's screen constantly on a 14" display.

@SelfIndulgentGamer

2 ай бұрын

You can on the first one too

@der.Schtefan

2 ай бұрын

@@cabbelos You can always try to hide what you're doing and only do the attacks when your opponent is not looking. It was a whole meta game, but also counting on "honor" system to not look.

Cathode Ray Dude made a pretty interesting video about these and other early optical mouses. It's very interesting how that tech didnt reach mass adoption sooner.

@YTKeepsDeletingAllMyComments

2 ай бұрын

Yeah I know of this mouse because of LGR and then CRD.

@JaredConnell

2 ай бұрын

He has quickly become one of my favorite retro tech channels, if anyone here doesn't know of him, they should check his channel out!

@djhaloeight

2 ай бұрын

@@YTKeepsDeletingAllMyCommentsditto

Back at the university, we loved to play two pranks on the freshmen trying to use the UNIX lab. The first one was to flip the orientation of the mousepads on the Sun workstations (exactly the same as you have here) so the mice wouldn't "work" properly. The second one was to activate the "decay screen" screensaver with a respawn time of zero, so the screen would start to melt as soon as mouse movement stopped. Combine those for maximum hilarity.

@desertfish74

Ай бұрын

Are you me? Lmao!

Ok, Shelby, I can't be the only one that find completely crazy that the box is not emblazoned with the word optical all capital in huge text!

@TechTangents

2 ай бұрын

The mouse at home was still such a new concept that I don't think how it work mattered all that much to people. The PC Mouse was sold at least a year before the Macintosh came out, so it's not something that people would have really know was better yet.

@Toonrick12

2 ай бұрын

​@@TechTangentsHell, it predates the Lisa by at least a few months.

I remember using those mice on SPARCstation machines at uni. If the mouse mat was damaged or missing, you could print out a new mouse mat (using the SUN laser printer) and that worked too. I think it had to be a high contrast, high resolution printer.

@applesushi

2 ай бұрын

I managed a lab of SPARCStation 5’s and remember these very well. Nostalgia overload.

@Ad-fu3wi

2 ай бұрын

Some Sun work stations to

@DavidWonn

2 ай бұрын

I also used those in college in the 90s as well, though I recall how finicky the mice were. Due to this bad impression, I preferred "male" mice longer than most.

@jamespilcher5287

2 ай бұрын

Yup we had one on a solaris terminal at sussex uni in 1998

@martinkormunda2264

2 ай бұрын

i have one for SUN. But the metal pad is missing.

That exact mouse was used by Sun MicroSystems on there Sparc machines.They came with another connector, one that connected inside the keyboard.

I had a string of Sun workstations as daily drivers, the early ones used this system and I loved it. Pretty much everyone else in the company however preferred the ball mice that came later. Problem was that you could easily transfer the natural oil of your hands to the reflective pad and then the friction would become really horrible. I found a wrist support essential to keep the contamination to a minimum. I managed to keep my own pad in good shape, but in lab settings where the machines were shared the pads were always hopelessly grimed up and useless. Despite my love for this system, I found ball mice to require less maintenance overall.

It's truly vintage because the PIC microcontroller was still made by General Instruments 😉

The same type of mouse with its pad was the usual one used on UNIX systems from 1982 until 1998 (?) Sun type 4/Sun type 2/Sun type 3 for example.

His over excitement for that vintage mouse is kinda wholesome, dunno why. 😂

@geoffgunn9673

2 ай бұрын

the giggling got me

@Ad-fu3wi

2 ай бұрын

Love it

@marcse7en

2 ай бұрын

People get excited over all kinds of things, for all sorts of reasons, and at all ages! ... Enjoyment is enjoyment!

@anderstonfeldt

2 ай бұрын

I'll never forget his joy when he got that cd-rom controller card working.

@SonicBoone56

2 ай бұрын

​@@anderstonfeldt ikr

I used one of these around 1992-93 on a Sun SPARCstation to design print ads and produce color separations.

Doug Englebart's original idea for the mouse also included using two of them on a computer. One would be a pointer like normal, and the other would open compass-style menus and you'd choose the option by moving the second mouse in a direction. So, yeah two mice is the OG concept. I never saw it done for real like that. A spaceball or some kind of 3D mouse for CAD, along with a regular mouse or a trackball for normal daily use was as close as I saw.

So back in the day I used these on Sun Workstations in school. I vividly remember how difficult they were to use. The mouse pads were very small and our screens were very large black and white models. The mouse pad would slip and you needed to keep the mouse at the perfect angle or else it wouldn't track. When they worked it was beautiful and when they didn't work it was incredibly frustrating. It soured me on the entire idea of an optical mouse. I remember being surprised when the later versions came out for PC and they actually worked.

Funny, I still have my mouse like that from my 80's AutoCad days. It's mounted to a plaque on my wall as a going away gift when I quit that first CAD job in 1989. My Kurta IS/One took over shortly after.

"I'M DRAWING ON A 5160!" Love your excitement Shelby.

Oh, so nostalgic about that General Instrument PIC1654 microcontroller.

Genius! I have fond memories of cleaning my gummed up ball mice, with that disgusting felt that used to work it's way around the x/y posts.

@CptJistuce

2 ай бұрын

No, Mouse Systems. Genius was a different mouse brand.

@RingingResonance

2 ай бұрын

The call it 'felt' because it felt funny when I touched it.

@TSteffi

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, I remember the times when you had to take out the ball, clean it, and also clean the rollers inside. Some mice had very light weight plastic balls, and those were much more sensitive to dust buildup. The other kind of mice had rubberized balls of steel, and those worked much better from my memory.

@SomeMorganSomewhere

2 ай бұрын

FOND memories... yeesh ;P

A similar Mouse Systems optical mouse was sometimes used with earlier Sun workstations. I remember seeing one when I was maybe 9 years old, and thought it was so amazing!

Lovely! I first used a serial Mouse Systems Mouse in 1988 for PCB CAD work. I understood the visible / infra-red aspect used with the mat, but it was more than my job was worth to risk taking it apart. I love those optical sensors! I noticed that the bus interface board is using a standard PC compatible UART chip so I guess the Bus aspect of this edition was the inclusion of the serial interface in the box since early PCs didn't have them as standard - certainly my 286 machine from 1989 didn't.

@MrDuncl

Ай бұрын

One CAD program I used on a 286 PC was Schema. You could draw a schematic then synthesize it into a CPLD. Later a colleague tried loading it onto a 486 but it was unusable as the cursor moved at Warp Factor 15.

@GodmanchesterGoblin

Ай бұрын

@MrDuncl Later versions of Schema that I used (maybe from around 1993 or so) were OK on a 486, but I can certainly relate to the warp-speed mouse reponse with some older software.

Came across a few of these over the years, was vaguely aware of the fact it needed the special mat to work but not how it actually did that! Great video as always, thank you! I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but the glitchy audio on that fast-forward effect really grates on me and I have to skip it...

Your delighted enthusiasm is just adorable, love it 😊

Your joy and retro tech is infectious. Cheers.

I had an optical mouse for my Amiga computer which had a dot screen instead of the grid. When my mouse pad wore out I photocopied a mechanical screen transfer I had as a graphic designer and put a clear plastic cover on it to keep using it. It worked well. 😊

Glad I loved that Mouse. This was how we needed back then.

Love the color scheme of the box and manuals. So fresh!

Always love your videos, great job!! I learned lots, & your joy in the video brought me some joy to my work day =D

Oh, the magic of being able to draw on screen with a mouse and point and click at things! Excellent. Took me right back to that wonder.

It is really nice and quite entertaining to see you this excited :D

When I first started work, my Sun workstation had the Sun version of this mouse. Great mouse.

Yes!! Used one of these on our PCjr when I was a kid

When I went to Ohio State in the late '90s we had some big labs full of Sun Sparcstations, and all of them had those mice. They were soooooo much nicer than other mice. Other mice all had the worst little rubber rollers that got dirty pretty fast.

My uncle had one of these mice in his office’s HP Vectra. It was actually the first mouse I ever saw and used.

This mouse-controller-card is just a nearly normal rs232c but with one difference: It supplies +5VDC to the mouse. On normal Ports there is no pin with dedicated +5V.

There was a PCjr-specific version of this mouse, too. It had only two buttons and plugged into two different ports on the back of the jr, the serial and the light pen port (the latter used for power).

I love this guys videos . Keep it up man.

That was my first mouse! I connected it to my Columbia Data Systems MPC1600 I bought in 1984, an IBM clone. The next I was using the mouse with Microsoft Windows version 1.03. Just imagine running Windows from two floppy drives and NO hard drive. When I started working at a large electronics company around 1988 they had Apollo workstation computers running PCB CAD software and the computers used the same Mouse System mice.

@MrDuncl

Ай бұрын

We had the Apollo workstations for one year before Mentor dropped support for them and we moved to Sun. Were your Apollo monitors awful? Our were so dim all the systems had to be in a room with blackout blinds. The Sun monitors just worked like any other CRT.

@Nedski42YT

Ай бұрын

@@MrDuncl HP bought Apollo and we transitioned to HP and Sun workstations during the 1990's. We were running Mentor Graphics Boardstation for schematic capture and PCB layout. Others in the building were using Sun workstations running Cadence for IC layout. Late in the 1990's some projects were using PADS PCB and I switched to another department and they were using Orcad schematic and PCB layout and the EE's were designing Altera FPGA's with Altera's proprietary software on Windows PC's. Yup, it was a messed up place to work! The best of times and the worst of times. 🙂 🤔

@MrDuncl

Ай бұрын

@@Nedski42YT In the 1980s I worked for a large Aerospace company and have joked that back then every department had to have an incompatible CAD system. Racal Redac, Daisy, and Computervision are three that spring to mind. I regularly used both of the first two. I suspect that there was an element of truth to what I said. If a head of department wanted a CAD system for his empire he had to find one with a feature no other departments had. I still have happy memories of going in on a Saturday morning on overtime rates to enter schematics on a Racal Redac systems that cost more than my house. Having found a Sun price list from 1988 I think some of those were as well. $84500 for a Sun 3/260CXP with 1376-MByte of Hard Drive storage.

Wow. The first optical mouse I saw was at work in the mid 90's, this is a decade earlier! A lot of clever stuff is going on to make that work so well, such as drawing the mouse cursor graphic over the text mode display.

Thanks for sharing, really enjoyed video

Had one of these on my Sun3/75 workstation at work (mid-late 80's). Scrimped and saved to get one for my PC at home (Taiwan V30 TURBO PC Clone) -- The mouse pads were surprisingly durable. I saw several that had been rolled over with office chairs and they would work fine once you flattened them back out again! Best tracking mouse I've ever used.

This guy is so full of joy, makes me smile every time

Not shown: the text-mode pointer, which worked by changing the background color of the character where the mouse was, using red. You can experience that in a number of apps, including QBASIC/EDIT, Norton Commander, or in Word for DOS by switching to text mode (I think with ALT-F9? It’s in the menus). The text cursor visuals are implemented by the driver, not the apps. The graphic cursor is also implemented by the driver I believe, and the app can provide a custom mask for it. For apps that don’t support mouse natively like Lotus 1-2-3, you can install the custom drivers that are app-specific and work by injecting keystrokes; those are fairly limited in usefulness.

Absolutely loved the equivalent mouse on Sun SPARCStations back in the day - soooo much better than rubber ball mice.

Mouse systems sold them everywhere. I have one like this from Mouse Systems branded as "Sun" in my Sun machine, part number 370-1091-01, basically the same but with an RJ-11 connector (not that clunky)... Love your videos, Shelby 🙂

We had this mouse on our first PC. It was a home-brew. It was built by a coworker of my dad. He built it with this mouse and it came with the PC Paint installed too. Ours was apparently a later model. It was a Serial version and it came with a flexible version of the mousepad that had rubber on the bottom. But it's the same mouse. As a kid I also noticed the two lights and wondered why only one was always off. And wondered what the grid was about. And when I saw a ball mouse later on for the first time on our Gateway 2000 Windows 3.11 PC I didn't understand why. Why indeed did they switch to ball mice for such a long time. Oh, and the mousepad never scratched in all the years we had it. It was pretty darn durable.

@Toonrick12

2 ай бұрын

I can only assume that the LED inside these early mice were the most expensive part of the mouse.

Hello Nice enthusiastic presentation. I used very similar mouse to this one in 1993, when I was testing the Pro/Engineer 3D CAD software in Silicon Graphics Personal Iris 4D/25. If you open the Wikipedia page about Personal Iris workstation, the mouse is clearly visible in the right down edge of its photo. First, I regularly used a mouse of any type a few years before with IBM PC-AT which ran under DOS. Only software that used mouse on this computer was AutoCAD… Ah, sweet memories…

1982 ? Wow ! I encountered this tech only at university, working on Sun workstations ! Never thought it was older and worked on PC, especially that old.

We had one of those optical mice that required the special shiny mat as well, back in about 1993. Very nice experince, once you got the drivers to co-operate!

Now that brings back memories. We had the same mouse on an XT clone, except we had the serial version. It used a db25 connector with a barrel jack on the connector shell for a DC power supply.

A hand drawn "hello I'm 5160" inside your pcpaint IBM would have been sick 😂

I still own this mouse but for Amiga. Bought when it came out, still mint and with its box. I loved playing Shufflepuck café and Arkanoïd 2 with this device!

Optical mice like this date back to Xerox Alto and the 1970s. They had at least three generations, where they started with something like a optomechanical "ball mouse" without the ball; the encoder wheels tracked the table directly. Then they used a ball mouse, then an optical mouse on the reflective grid system like your PC mouse. I think they all are basically the same in terms of electronics and logic, although the mechanical parts are different. The ball mice have the benefit of not requiring a special pad and aren't constrained by the dimensions of the pad, rather the dimensions of the table or similar surface in general. That's why it took so long for the "modern" CMOS camera mice to replace the ball mice in general usability. A document by Xerox that talks about these different mice and how they implemented their systems. Based on just glancing through the document, these basic optical mice are first demonstrated in 1967. KZread doesn't like linking, so you have to find it yourself, it's by Richard F. Lyon, tittled "The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors", and is dated 1981.

Some systems I worked with in the Marines(can't give many details) had one of the old school optical mice. It was so absolutely terrible that I stuck with ball mice at home for an honestly unreasonable amount of time. I have no idea why they used opticals, they were on garrison systems not field systems so cleanliness of the ball wasn't an issue, you wouldn't have to pop the ball out to clean it under fire or anything and we kept our spaces pretty clean to begin with.

I had the SGI version of these mice for four SGI turbo 2020 systems from the late 80s! The SGIs were as big as a bar fridge, and the MSM used a red laser diode and not an LED.

The glee from using this mouse in DOS is hilarious ;)

OMG!!! Why is this so freaking awesome? Love it!!! 😁👍

Hearing those excited giggles bring me such joy

If I’d designed the packaging, I’d have put: “The best mouse ever. No ball. No bull.”

Man you know what era a computer is from just by how it sounds working on it- as you turned the ratcheting screw driver to fasten the card and the sound resonated through the sheet metal, I couldn’t help but think “why does that sound like he’s working with a car”

They had one of these in the computer lab at Sussex University in 1998. It was hooked up to a solaris terminal

They also made a 1-button ADB version of this mouse...using it was interesting

Three buttons. Then we had two for the longest time. Then the wheel. Then clickable wheel. Now we have MMO mice with 50 buttons.

@Toonrick12

2 ай бұрын

I only need five, thank you very much.

@irinotecanhcl

2 ай бұрын

And then there was Apple, stubbornly insisting you only needed one...

The best part is that it still has the warranty

I would plotz unboxing and testing that thing, love the enthusiasm!

Sun workstations also had these kind of optical mice, with a specially crafted mousepad. I remember using these in the uni.

Nice! In college I used a Sun 3/60 with a pretty similar mouse. Back in the day, I had an Atari ST at home (since 1987!) so I knew what a mouse was, but found amazing it being ball-less, even if if needed that strange pad!

I remember seeing a mouse like this in around 1983, attached tina TI Profesional PC and windows didn't exist. Trying to remember if even the Mac 128k was already released.

@MrDuncl

Ай бұрын

The Mac was 1984 - So 1984 won't be like 1984.

Our school had these, but the caretakers were asked to glue the mouse mats down so they didn’t get stole. The glued them the wrong 90 degrees out and they didn’t work.

Super cool!

My father had this hooked to the original Compaq portable and it was so easy to break just by scratching the pad

Went I attended Hull University they had Sun branded versions of these, I remember they were neat but very inaccurate to use because the mouse pads inevitably got worn down and dirty.

Awesome this tech existed in the early 80s already. But must have cost a fortune! I really enjoyed, thanks for the review🤗

This time the box advertising is 100% accurate😅 I remember early optical mouses from late 1990s that required the special mouse pads to work. They were considered inferior due this limitation to normal ball mouses and were too expensive.

It's rather funny how optical mice from later generations have as an advantage over ball mouses not needing a mouse pad in most situations (whereas a ball mouse needs a somewhat grippy surface for the ball to roll upon), and this first gen one, on the contrary, needs its pad to work at all. Btw, I also have enjoyed watching that mouse work on that machine more than I expected, even if I thought it was going to be interesting to begin with!

I used one of these mouses connected to a Sun Sparkstation, and I think there was one on a silicon graphic I used for a few hours.

The first ever mouse that I had as a child was one of these! A serial version, I think, that I used with a 286. I remember playing Railroad Tycoon with it.

Used a similar mouse on a Sun workstation in the mid nineties. It was fun to try them on different surfaces to see what they would and wouldn't work on.

I have never seen someone enjoy using a mouse this much 😂

I used one of these for years on a SparcStation 1. The big problem was the felt would soak things up and get tacky and it was hard to clean properly. But the precision compared to the intertia of a mouse ball was really nice.

I had very similar with my 286 back in the day if not exactly that one. With the metal plate for a mousepad too. Later got a ball mouse and man did it constantly need to be cleaned.

Oh man the bots are swarming.

So amazing. I only saw this one in movies.

I had a ball-less mouse for my Atari ST back in the late 80's. It was so much better than one with a ball. That also only worked with a special mouse mat but it was silver and didn't have the same grid pattern, it was more like dots and I don't remember the mouse having to be perfectly orientated to use it. When I upgraded to a PC in the mid 90's I had to go back to a ball mouse and it was definitely a downgrade in the mouse.

The intellimouse 3.0 was an amazing mouse. Bought one when it came out, and used it till it died.

This is awesome!

My father had an ATI VGA Wonder-16 combined with this mouse. The graphics card had a connector for bus mice integrated and it would work just like your card, but it only took up one ISA-slot. The whole setup, including maximal memory expansion was incredibly expensive though, costing upwards of 1000 Dutch Guilders. Luckily this could be written off as Business Expenses, which meant he didn't have to pay VAT.

All these joyous exclamations were almost certainly expressed back in the day.

I SAW YOUR "IBM" SWINGLINE!

I swear, this channel makes me so sad because I literally 'recycled' thousands of these things. Okay maybe not thousands, but a few boxes full of tangled dozens of them.

5 and 7 were for lpt ports 2 was usually used by the system. 3 and 4 were used for com 1 and 2 I used IRQ 5 for com 3 a lot 10 was for the sound card 14 and 15 were for the IDE 1 and IDE 0 Very nice how they had the instructions on the screen with the jumper settings This was made for end users to install themselves. The good old days

One of my favorite PC memories was sitting down with an IBM XT with a mouse and installing Geoworks Ensemble. I'd been using computers for years at that point but it was really super cool to be running a full GUI, something Microsoft tried (and failed, IMHO) to do. Have you ever done a show about Geoworks? You should!

My dad had one of these he used for the old “racal redac” schematic and pcb software. I still have the hardware key for that but not the software. But those mouses were great

Suggestion for another video... The Olivetti Spark Jet printer. (I had one of those Mouse Systems Mice.)

Period correct. Because that was my PC when I got this mouse. And that’s the same keyboard too, with the left F-keys. 😍

I remember when the intellimouse was released we ended up replacing every ball mouse within months of it's release.

I remember using Sun Sparc IPX workstations in the early 90’s that used optical mice similar to this one. At UNC-Charlotte. They worked great until some fool tried to rip the grid mouse pad off the table top and bent it.

I legit could watch your videos all damn day. Please upload more often Shelby!

As an undergrad I used a mouse like that on a Sun3 that had been re-tasked as an "X-box" (which was what we called an X terminal emulator at the time)