
20 Years Ago, Microsoft Changed How We Mouse Forever - ron0c
https://gizmodo.com/20-years-ago-microsoft-changed-how-we-mouse-forever-1834274151
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ken
I lived through this transition and I truly don’t recall any of the issues
with ball mice. They always worked fine for me.

You had to clean out the ball every now and then, but I have to clean off my
optical sensor fairly regularly, too.

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jjeaff
I remember having to clean out the ball thing every few days. And if you
waited too long, I needed tweezers to scrape the lint loose. I don't recall
ever actually needing to clean the optical sensor on an optical mouse.

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pushpop
You shouldn’t need to do it every few days unless your surfaces were
particularly grimy. And on those kind of surfaces the slip pads would still
need cleaning even on optical mice plus the sensors on the early ones didn’t
work too great unless you had clean smooth surfaces anyway. So like for like,
ball mice should last 6 months before needing a clean.

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byteCoder
Optical mice existed prior to Microsoft's IntelliMouse.

In 1989, I owned an optical mouse (Logitech S9?). The biggest issue was that
that mouse required a special gridded mouse pad.

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neogodless
Certainly true. The article mentions:

> Microsoft was far from the first company to incorporate optical tracking
> into a mouse. The approach dates back as far as 1980 when a pair of
> inventors came up with two different approaches to tracking mouse movements
> through imaging.

Of course, the point is that most of us still were not using an optical mouse
at that time, and as you pointed out, this new mainstream mouse worked on more
common surfaces. So it still changed how we use mice, en masse.

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xkgt
I don't understand why everyone talks about cleaning the ball, whereas for it
was the roller which accumulated dirt every time. Gone are the days when we
shuddered to use mouse without a mousepad. A truly welcome change indeed.

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rasz
Oral History of Gary Gordon:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxxoWhCzIeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxxoWhCzIeU)
HP engineer, inventor of the sensor.

