

The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Career - srikar
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/the-engineer-of-the-original-apple-mouse-talks-about-his-remarkable-career/

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jtheory
Neat.

And it's a curious feeling to stumble upon memories I haven't touched in years
-- I used to love idly disassembling computer mice, cleaning out fuzz and gunk
from the little rollers and the ball, and putting them back together. It was
one of things I had to consciously stop myself from doing if I was sitting at
someone else's desk.

Optical mice have been around so long now, I had completely forgotten how they
used to work, and that odd little pleasure of maintaining a simple mechanical
device.

Edit: this confuses me, though: _The basic approach — pairing a freely-rolling
ball with a optoelectronic system — was used by generations of mice that
followed, changing only incrementally until optical mice did away with
trackballs altogether._

Is that right? The mice I was always taking apart normally detected the motion
of the trackball with two little white rollers, for Y and X motion. That's
neither of these systems.

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dammitcoetzee
Yes, that's right. The little rollers were on an axle that extended a bit
further terminating into a spoked disk which sat in the middle of an optical
detector and emitter pair. It used some tricks to figure out when the mouse
was going forward and when it was going backward (quadrature), but mostly it
just counts the pulses of light it sees and turns that into displacement
coordinates.

EDIT: Wikipedia has a pretty good picture of this and a better explanation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Mechanical_mi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_\(computing\)#Mechanical_mice)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I thought the holes in the disk were in Grey code? Maybe that reduces to
quadrature in small cases

~~~
joezydeco
The encoder disc is really a 1-dimensional input. Adding a second opto-
detector that is one half-bit out of phase gives you two simultaneous inputs
and yes, it comes out to a 2-bit Grey code.

00 -> 01 -> 11 -> 10 -> 00

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AndrewKemendo
I love this because it largely debunks the theme that apple simply "stole" the
the mouse in a copy-paste fashion. In fact, this article does a great job
describing a core capability of engineers: taking something complicated and
making it simpler by using other principles.

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teddyh
> _The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco
> remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver
> a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!”
> he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they
> use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes._

This was certainly not a new insight – it was clearly explained in 1968 in the
“Mother of all Demos” by Douglas Engelbart, where the original computer mouse
was first introduced. This insight is what enabled the mouse to even exist –
previous similar devices were known as digitizer boards and were strictly tied
to their pads – they were one integrated unit. The very idea of a mouse device
by itself is absolutely dependent on this insight that precise accuracy is not
necessary.

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pascal_cuoq
There is a mine of documents related to the Apple mouse at [http://www-
sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html](http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html)

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teddyh
> _He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed
> perfect for the job._

Would that not have been patented? Did Apple licence it from Atari? If they
did, they were lucky that Atari allowed it – Atari might simply have denied
Apple a license.

EDIT: Replace “Atari” with “whoever owned the patent”.

~~~
jacobolus
I’m pretty sure this design for trackballs dates back quite a bit before the
Atari trackballs he was looking at for inspiration. You’d have to go do a
patent search to figure out exactly who invented it and when.

~~~
joezydeco
Apple's mouse patent cites US 3,625,083 which was filed in 1969 by Singer.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083](https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083)

Military tech historians note that the trackball was in use much earlier than
this for radar tracking systems, but it was kept in secret.

