
TrackPoint (2011) - jjoe
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60
======
Daishiman
And this is why I've been using Thinkpads for the past 17 years. After
becoming competent with the Trackpoint, any other laptop input method seems
frustratingly slow and prone to unnecessary movements. It is especially well
suited for working with Vim and keyboard-heavy workflows where every second
you spend with your fingers on the keyboard is a second of productivity.

You can pry the Trackpoint from, cold dead fingers. It's too bad that no other
laptop vendor has adopted such a fine and well-designed input interface.

~~~
jmartinpetersen
A lot of vendors actually did, though with different names (HP called it
PointStick and Dell called it Track Stick - I think both were blue).

I'm also very fond of my Trackpoint, although heavy usage does give me some
nasty RSI like symptoms in the hands/fingers.

~~~
noir_lord
They do different caps, I had similar issues but found the cup shaped one was
way better, as your finger fits into the cup slight you have to apply way less
downwards force alongside lateral force.

They aren't expensive I think I paid 10 pounds for 8 or something on ebay
years ago, they last forever.

~~~
DonHopkins
I always thought there should be an aftermarket for designer Trackpoint caps,
like Pink Hello Kitty Caps, or Black Spikey Hipster Caps, or Fleshy Famous
Porn Star Caps.

I wonder if 3D printers can render the special kind of rubber that Ted's
father designed for the trackpad tops?

~~~
joshuapants
I remember seeing purple ones at one point, and I don't think any manufacturer
used that color as standard, so it must have been an option at some point.

------
MrUnderhill
Lenovo's bluetooth keyboard [1] is quite nice if you've gotten used to a
pointing stick and want it on your desktop as well.

It's fairly expensive (~80 USD), but it's one of the better chiclet-style
keyboards I've tried.

The main drawbacks are imho Fn/Ctrl position (Fn bottom left, cannot be
swapped with Ctrl) and a bit poor Bluetooth range. Strangely, they've also put
a huge PrtSc key between AltGr and Ctrl, which is easy to accidentally hit.
(The Ubuntu camera sound has occasionally scared the bejeebies out of me.)

Apart from that, I'm really happy with it. There is a Linux utility to lock
the Fn keys which works well [2]. It charges via USB (~1 week battery time
with high usage), but does not function as a USB keyboard.

[1]
[http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0B47189/460/60AC6A0...](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0B47189/460/60AC6A0372B14F5BA7B12F1FF88E33C7)

[2] [https://github.com/lentinj/tp-compact-
keyboard](https://github.com/lentinj/tp-compact-keyboard)

~~~
PopeOfNope
There's also the Tex Yoda, for those who are also fans of minimal mechanical
keyboards. You have to wait for a group buy on massdrop to buy one, though.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/2tn5i0/the_tex_yo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/2tn5i0/the_tex_yoda_trackpoint_mechanical_keyboard_is/)

[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=58458.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=58458.0)

~~~
david-given
(Link doesn't work if you're not a massdrop member.)

~~~
yohui
You can append ?mode=guest_open to Massdrop URLs to bypass the sign-up page:

[https://www.massdrop.com/buy/tex-
yoda?mode=guest_open](https://www.massdrop.com/buy/tex-yoda?mode=guest_open)

~~~
PopeOfNope
Thanks! I'll have to remember that.

------
Stratoscope
Ted briefly mentions a multi-TrackPoint keyboard near the end of the
interview. A prototype looked like this:

[http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/tp/2handed.gif](http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/user/tp/2handed.gif)

This would have been fun if they'd shipped it and if software could have been
written for it. The idea was that each TrackPoint would have its own cursor,
so for example in a text editor you could use one for selecting text and the
other for menus.

~~~
DonHopkins
Ted demonstrated that at the NPUC (New Paradigms for Using Computers) workshop
that he hosted at IBM Almaden Research Center in the 90's, running on OS/2 at
the time.

You're right: "modern" desktop software has no idea how to handle two pointing
devices, so the gui and apps would have to be redesigned from the ground up to
really take advantage of two trackpoints.

It's a shame it never took off (and that IBM didn't rewrite OS/2 from the
ground up to support multiple input devices ;). You can imagine what the
multi-trackpoint would be called, given that a single trackpoint is called the
"keyboard clit".

------
dade_
This is a great story for people working for an HID startup. The finished
product always seems so simple.

I always liked the trackpoint more than trackball, and the ThinkPad always had
the best implementation. However, I was introduced to GlidePoint in the early
90's (I still have it, it has a 9 pin serial connector) and have always
preferred a full featured trackpad because it allowed for gestures, but as the
article demonstrates, people get invested into the device they use and it
becomes a (strong) preference.

It gave me the thought to check into the settings for the pen on my Surface
and just discovered "flicks". I had no idea the feature existed.

~~~
DonHopkins
Flicks: Another name for pie menus. [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu)

~~~
dade_
It does have pie menus for the touch interface, but there is yet another
interface: [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows7/what-are-
flicks](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows7/what-are-flicks)

~~~
DonHopkins
What I mean is that "Flicks" are essentially the same as pie menus, just
another name for a particular implementation of pie menus, with its own set of
features, limitations, visual feedback, design decisions and trade-offs (like
limiting the number of items to 8, which is a sound idea).

So I would argue that Windows has at least two different types of pie menus,
including Flicks. (Does IE still support that weird mouse-wheel-press up/down
scrolling cookie? There's another!)

Much like many web sites have at least two kinds of linear menus: the stylish
HTML popup menus that drop down when you mouse over the header titles, and the
native platform dropdown menus that pop up when you mouse down in a select
input. [5]

Pie menus can and should support "mouse (or pen, finger, whatever) ahead" and
"display pre-emption" so you can operate them with quick flicks, without
unnecessary feedback. But they can also optionally provide different kinds of
visual feedback including traditional pop-up menu windows [1 @ 4:30], cursor
icons [2 @ 4:40], drawing strokes and animated overlays (i.e. pac-man [1 @
8:35], precision [1 @ 13:12], window management [3 @ 2:08]), and "direct
manipulation" real-time in-world continuous feedback (i.e. object rotation
tool [2 @ 4:40], font style selection [4 @ 1:55]).

[1]
[http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/video/1991/1991_piemenus.mpg](http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/video/1991/1991_piemenus.mpg)

[2]
[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TheSimsPieMenus.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TheSimsPieMenus.mov)

[3]
[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov)

[4]
[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/JavaScriptPieMenus.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/JavaScriptPieMenus.mov)

[5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1cu_1vTNPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1cu_1vTNPw)

The Sims supports two different kinds of pie menus:

1) The round pop-up menu windows that you get when you right click on an
object to select an available action [2 @ 2:12], with a head in the middle,
surrounded by text item labels.

2) Also the direct manipulation "object rotation tool" that lets you turn an
object around to face four different directions [2 @ 4:40], which uses audio
and cursor feedback plus in-world "direct manipulation" feedback by rotating
the object itself in real time.

Operationally, the object rotation tool tracks exactly like a four-item pie
menu sliced vertically and horizontally, with a small inactive region in the
center. But visually it's so obvious what it does that there's no need to pop
up a window with labels.

Real time visual feedback previewing the effect of the gesture in the world is
the ideal direct visual representation, so if there's a good way to obviously
and unambiguously represent the menu actions directly, like applying attribute
changes to text [4 @ 1:55], it renders distracting pop-up windows unnecessary
(or optional and useful for training).

In 1988, the HyperTIES hypermedia browser [6] supported pie menus with
directional flicking gestures and mouse-ahead display pre-emption for paging
forward and back (left and right), navigating the history, selecting which
window to open a link in, and user defined menus with feedback based on
continuous direction and distance (color hue/saturation/brightness [1 @
10:42], font family/style/size [1 @ 12:14], etc).

[6]
[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/LookBackAtHyperTIES.html](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/ties/LookBackAtHyperTIES.html)

>Designing to facilitate browsing: A look back at the Hyperties workstation
browser. Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins,
William Weiland.

>Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions:

>To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window
selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique
avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu
items at the top or bottom of the screen.

>3\. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION

>The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used
commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu
whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The
menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the
cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by
moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking.
Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and
reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection
depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select
from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection,
but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the
control of the selection is.

>The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons
showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the
previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by
pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window,
they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the
control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of
those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other
hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these
commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual
and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember
directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and
the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates
gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users
can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that
it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead
display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.

------
nicwest
I recently stopped brining my work MBP home in favour of a second hand lenovo
X200. I often find myself reaching for the trackpoint on the MBP, but I never
reach for the trackpad on the X200. It's weird how quickly this became the
intuitive thing to do.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I stopped brining my macbooks too. I get a better result if I soak them in
buttermilk instead.

------
DonHopkins
Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2]
or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of
research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written
up and published the story. [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Selker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Selker)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick)

[3] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/bibuxton/buxto...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60)

I'm glad for the chance to share some of the stories he's told me verbally
over the years, some of which I wrote up about a year ago, and I will update
with links to more fascinating information about his work. [4]

[4]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1o26fb/old_school_thin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1o26fb/old_school_thinkpad_701c_the_butterfly_keyboard/ccohw9z)

Ted is one of my favorite successful mad scientist inventor heroes, who's
created many amazing ideas, and followed through to make them practical
products! He's in the same league as Will Wright [5], Trurl and Klapaucius
[6], Dr. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. [7], and Rick and Morty [8].

[5]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_%28game_designer%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_%28game_designer%29)

[6]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad)

[7]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Brown)

[8]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_and_Morty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_and_Morty)

In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand
from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do
quite often. `

He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he
was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea
into a product.

He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-
skid rubber that the clitoris was made from.

IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse
for common tasks.

The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand
repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you
can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute
positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming
that problem.

The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since
you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of
time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better
for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime
real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is
impossible to use with a laptop.

He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking
speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of
the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times
you needed to move it quickly across a large area.

So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-
linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor
moved.

The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there
was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one
exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around
with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after
the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye
tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of
harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for
coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a
fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen.

They did lots of user studies and took lots of measurements and performed lots
of experiments to determine the best parameters for the pressure-to-speed
transfer function, and finally came up with one that was measurably good
enough to make IBM happy and ship in products.

So after pooh-pooh-ing the name "Joy Button", IBM finally settled on and
trademarked the name "Trackpoint." But one concession they made, was when they
published a two page ad spread in Time Magazine with a close-up of the
trackpoint, above the slogan "So hot, we had to make it red!"

Another crazy but brilliant innovation he developed was the Thinkpad 755CV [9]
that you could remove the back of the LCD screen and lay it down on an
overhead projector to project the video! Nobody probably remembers overhead
projectors any more, but they were very popular at the time, and that feature
could save you a lot of money, and you never had to reboot it three times just
to get the video on the projector, like with modern laptops!

[9]
[http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:755CV](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:755CV)

He also made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO hot red trackpoints on the
keyboard, which invitingly resembled a pair of nipples. It was very popular
with everyone he tested it on, but unfortunately OS/2 had no idea how to cope
with two pointing devices, so there wasn't much use for it, besides being a
wonderful ice breaker at parties.

I don't know if his lab is the one that invented the butterfly keyboard, but
it was another in a long line of wonderful innovative ideas that were coming
out of IBM's research labs and showing up in the Thinkpad at the time.

I learned about this stuff from the talks and demos he gave at his NPUC - New
Paradigms for Using Computers [10] workshop that he produced at IBM Alameda
Research Labs. [11] -- it was a really great free workshop, including free
lunch, with people like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy!

[10]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM)

[11]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw)

Ted Selker, not Edwin Selker, explains the theory and story behind the
Trackpoint. [12]

[12]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY?t=0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY?t=0s)

Computer Human Interface Technology IBM ARC - 8_95. [13]

[13]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJbjmZaAI4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJbjmZaAI4)

1995 IBM NPUC Augment and Bootstrap Institute (July 27, 1995), with Ashok
Chandra (IBM), Ted Selker (IBM), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Terry Winnograd
(Stanford), Henry Lieberman (MIT), David Kelly (IDEO) , Douglass Engelbart
(Bootstrap Institute), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), James Gosling (Sun), Marc Davis
(Interval Research), Ramana Rao (Xerox PARC), Steve Mann, Thad Starner (MIT).
[14]

[14]
[http://archive.org/details/XD1932_95IBM_NPUC_AugBootstrapIns...](http://archive.org/details/XD1932_95IBM_NPUC_AugBootstrapInst)

NPUC '94 Tape 1A Window Dub. [15]

[15]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtUGnhVJsh8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtUGnhVJsh8)

NPUC '97 Highlights #1. [16]

[16]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSOmRK_PTqM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSOmRK_PTqM)

NPUC '97 Highlights #2. [17]

[17]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM)

NPUC 1997 Part of Ted's Talk From Compilation 2. [18]

[18]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw)

NPCU talks by Don Hopkins and Don Norman, discussing how well intentioned user
interface designs can unintentionally enable users to easily destroy cities
and cause nuclear meltdowns. [19]

[19]
[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/NPUCHopkinsNorman.mov](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/NPUCHopkinsNorman.mov)

How We Create Power Supply _ From Compilation 1 [20], in which Ted Selker
explains why and how his group designed new kinds of power supplies, and
focuses on their design approach of doing lots of competing designs at once
and comparing them.

[20]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dApu7r1WxNk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dApu7r1WxNk)

Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad,
and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted
noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified
and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and
shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a
big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the
coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!

He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always
carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.

~~~
ghshephard
Thanks for the remarkable post - one question, "the fundamental problem with
it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not
an absolute positioning device like a mouse." \- it seems to me that
touchpads, mice, and trackpoint nubs are _all_ relative positioning devices.
The only input devices that I can think of that are absolute would be a touch-
display or digitizer.

~~~
DonHopkins
What I meant was that some input devices are "more relative" than others, i.e.
second derivative, pressure controlling velocity, instead of movement
controlling position. With pressure controlling velocity, you're one more
level removed from what you actually want to control, which is position. But
that level of abstraction does have its benefits, like avoiding the "nulling
problem" that makes context switching more difficult.

And in particular, the huge advantages the trackpad benefits from, which
overcome the costs of being "more relative", is that it's in a small fixed
location, and that location is right where your hands already are, minimizing
the (enormous and frequently repeated) cost of switching between pointing and
typing tasks (0.75 - 1.75 seconds).

Since the trackpad controls velocity, you can press it for as long as you want
to move the cursor as far as you want in one direction. But with a mouse or
trackpad that controls position, you eventually have to lift your mouse or
finger and recenter (nulling it) when you hit the edge of the desk or
trackpad.

Simply taking your finger off of the trackpoint stops moving (nulling it),
while a joystick requires a spring to return it to the center (nulling it) to
make it stop moving when you take your hand off of it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_device#Joystick](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_device#Joystick)

>Isotonic joysticks are handle sticks where the user can freely change the
position of the stick, with more or less constant force. Joystick. Analog
stick.

>Isometric joysticks – where the user controls the stick by varying the amount
of force they push with, and the position of the stick remains more or less
constant. Isometric joysticks are often cited as more difficult to use due to
the lack of tactile feedback provided by an actual moving joystick.

>Pointing stick: A pointing stick is a pressure-sensitive small nub used like
a joystick. It is usually found on laptops embedded between the 'G', 'H', and
'B' keys. It operates by sensing the force applied by the user. The
corresponding "mouse" buttons are commonly placed just below the spacebar. It
is also found on mice and some desktop keyboards.

Bill Buxton wrote an insightful and classic paper (one of my favorite of his
many great papers) called "Lexical and Pragmatic Considerations of Input
Structures" that explains what I'm getting at.

[http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html](http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html)

It's well worth reading the whole paper (it's short and accessible), but
here's the relevant stuff:

Check out "Figure 1: Taxonomy of Input Devices", with the vertical axis
labeled "Property Sensed: Position, Motion, Pressure (Sensing Mechanism, Touch
Sensitive)", and the horizontal axis labeled "Number of Dimensions (1, 2, 3)".

[http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical1.gif](http://www.billbuxton.com/lexical1.gif)

The column labeled "Number of Dimensions / 2 / Small Fixed Location" has the
following cells:

"Isotonic Joystick" @ "Position / Sensing Mechanism"

"Spring Joystick, Trackball" @ "Motion / Sensing Mechanism"

"X/Y Pad" @ "Motion / Touch Sensitive"

"Isometric Joystick" (i.e. trackpoint) @ "Pressure / Touch Sensitive".

>Caption: Continuous manual input devices are categorized. The first order
categorization is property sensed (rows) and number of dimensions (columns).
Subrows distinguish between devices that have a mechanical intermediary (such
as a stylus) between the hand and the sensing mechanism (indicated by "M"),
and those which are touch sensitive (indicated by "T"). Subcolumns distinguish
devices that use comparable motor control for their operation.

>[Discussion...] Before leaving the topic of the tableau, it is worth
commenting on why a primary criterion for grouping devices was whether they
were sensitive to position, motion or pressure. The reason is that what is
sensed has a very strong effect on the nature of the dialogues that the system
can support with any degree of fluency. As an example, let us compare how the
user interface of an instrumentation console can be affected by the choice of
whether motion or position sensitive transducers are used. For such consoles,
one design philosophy follows the traditional model that for every function
there should be a device. One of the rationales behind this approach is to
avoid the use of "modes" which result when a single device must serve for more
than one function. Another philosophy takes the point of view that the number
of devices required in a console need only be in the order of the control
bandwidth of the human operator. Here, the rationale is that careful design
can minimize the "mode" problem, and that the resulting simple consoles are
more cost-effective and less prone to breakdown (since they have fewer
devices).

>One consequence of the second philosophy is that the same transducer must be
made to control different functions, or parameters, at different times. This
context switching introduces something known as the nulling problem. The point
which we are going to make is that this problem can be completely avoided if
the transducer in question is motion rather than position sensitive. Let us
see why.

>Imagine that you have a sliding potentiometer which controls parameter A.
Both the potentiometer and the parameter are at their minimum values. You then
raise A to its maximum value by pushing up the position of the potentiometer's
handle. You now want to change the value of parameter B. Before you can do so
using the same potentiometer, the handle of the potentiometer must be
repositioned to a position corresponding to the current value of parameter B.
The necessity of having to perform this normalizing function is the nulling
problem.

>Contrast the difficulty of performing the above interaction using a position-
sensitive device with the ease of doing so using one which senses motion. If a
thumb-wheel or a treadmill-like device was used, the moment that the
transducer is connected to the parameter it can be used to "push" the value up
or "pull" it down. Furthermore, the same transducer can be used to
simultaneously change the value of a group of parameters, all of whose
instantaneous values are different.

------
DonHopkins
If the Trackpoint can be called the "Joy Button", then this patented invention
of Ted's can only be called the "Joy Button Frobulator".

I imagine that somewhere deep in Lenovo's labs there are a few refrigerated
shipping containers from IBM full of these contraptions, working hard all day
and night, poking and tweaking and twiddling and twisting hundreds of
Trackpoints, making a dynamo hum like so many centrifuges applying rotation in
a secret lab.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US5544530?dq=ininventor:%22Ed...](https://www.google.com/patents/US5544530?dq=ininventor:%22Edwin+J.+Selker%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DAo8VaqAAc7KOYfYgeAI&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAw)

Assembly suitable for life testing a multi-dimensional force transducer

>US 5544530 A ABSTRACT A test assembly suitable for life testing a computer
pointing stick includes a rigid shaft that is rotated by a motor and a
mounting mechanism for holding and positioning the pointing stick under test
in a coaxial relationship with the rigid shaft. A cantilever spring arm is
rigidly connected at one end to the rigid shaft so that it rotates with the
rigid shaft and is mechanically coupled under lateral spring tension at its
other end to the pointing stick. The spring rotates with the rigid shaft and
applies lateral force to the pointing stick via a collar attached to the
pointing stick, the direction of the applied force rotating with the rigid
shaft and cantilever spring. A counter records the cumulative number of
flexure cycles required to make the pointing stick functionally fail.

Weighing in at an astounding 37, Ted Selker wins the award for Most Uses of
the Phrase "Rigid Shaft" in a Patent!

------
philjohn
This. My first laptop (a Toshiba something or other) had a trackpoint, and
I've been a fan ever since.

People at work get quite frustrated trying to use my laptop as I disable the
track pad.

The only other device that has come close, in my opinion, is the MBP track
pad, and even that loses the benefit of not having to move your hands from the
home row on your keyboard.

------
MichaelGG
I love how he was able to just continue to develop and invent/improve things.
Was he intentionally skipping out on tons on intervening politics and
pleading, or was IBM really just that amazing?

This made me more sad than ever that IBM sold to Lenovo. I feel none of that
kind of quality or intelligence behind the products now.

------
mparramon
You can also try ditching the mouse/trackpad altogether, here's how I did it:

[http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/01/no-
mouse.html](http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/01/no-mouse.html)

------
bjblazkowicz
This is the sole reason why thinkpads are far superior compared to any laptop.

And the funny thing about TrackPoint is that people that never used it doesent
understand how good it is compared to touchpad.

The new "applefied" laptops are a disgrace for humanity.

~~~
DonHopkins
That, and being built like a tank.

It pissed Ted off that other cheap knockoff laptops aped his trackpoint design
without getting it right, which gave it a bad reputation: they were missing
the crucial patented pressure => speed transfer function, which had a plateau
at fine predictable positioning speed, a smooth slope to another faster
plateau within eye tracking speed, and then a high quick movement peak.

At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC
Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they
did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM
refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both
worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).

I finally got the irony of this old joke after working a few years at Kaleida,
a joint venture of Apple and IBM. It was like having dysfunctional parents who
were forever fighting with each other, but staying together for the sake of
the children.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

At Kaleida, I gave a ScriptX demo to Lou Gerstner that involved throwing a
bouncing eyeball around the screen for navigating and controlling the
application, but he wasn't very impressed by the practical applications. After
the demo, I realized I must have used the wrong eyeball.

What good is it having a right brain and a left brain, if they don't talk to
each other?

[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/WWDCScriptXDemo.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/WWDCScriptXDemo.mov)

[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/DreamScapeDemo.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/DreamScapeDemo.mov)

------
hmottestad
Having a char encoding issue

â€¦

Anyone know what encoding this is, and why it only seems applicable to part of
the text?

~~~
userbinator
UTF-8 interpreted as ISO-8859-1/Windows-1252 and then encoded back into UTF-8.
Probably came from a copy/paste of material in a different encoding, via a
program that was not charset-aware.

[http://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html](http://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html)

------
jodrellblank
I have never got past the problems he describes with overshoot and finger
pressure and sluggish motion combined, holding tension on my finger feels
unpleasant.

I hear the new square Blackberry has the keyboard itself double as the touch
sensitive trackpad. I haven't tried it, but that instantly sounds nice - like
the inverse of a touchscreen keyboard, if you will.

Do any of you know of a desktop or laptop keyboard where the keys - F and J
particularly - work as trackpads?

~~~
DonHopkins
I saw a CHI video demo of Ted Selker demonstrating a keyboard joystick key
years ago... Ted tried and evaluated a lot of different designs before
perfecting the trackpoint!

Some of his videos I linked to above might show some early prototypes.

Looks like using the key itself as a joystick is mentioned in this patent:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US5521596](http://www.google.com/patents/US5521596)

>The above objects are attained by providing a generally rectangular shaped
sensor assembly, including a plurality of sensors, which may be placed either
directly underneath an existing key of a data entry device or in between two
keys of a data entry device. When the sensor assembly is placed underneath an
existing key, the key is used as the analog pointing device. When the sensor
assembly is placed in between two keys, a separate joystick is used as the
analog pointing device.

Here's a paper that Barrett, Selker, Rutledge and Olyha wrote about "Negative
Inertia": using a dynamic force => velocity transfer function to make the
trackpoint seem snappier: smoother yet less sluggish.

Negative Inertia: A Dynamic Pointing Function

R. C. Barrett, E. J. Selker, J. D. Rutledge, R. S. Olyha, IBM Almaden Research
Center.

[http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/shortppr/rcb_bdy.htm](http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/shortppr/rcb_bdy.htm)

>In-keyboard isometric joysticks can give better performance than mice for
mixed typing/pointing tasks. The continuing challenge is to improve such
devices to the point that they are preferable even for pure pointing tasks.
Previous work has improved joystick performance by considering user perception
and motor skills. This paper considers the dynamics of the pointing operation.
A dynamic transfer function for an isometric joystick is described which
amplifies changes in the applied force to increase responsiveness without loss
of control. User tests show a 7.8 +/\- 3.5% performance improvement over a
standard non-dynamic joystick. This feature has been incorporated into the
TrackPoint III from IBM.

>[...] Figure 1 [gif file missing] illustrates the effect of the negative
inertia filter. The user applies an increasing force to begin a motion, holds
constant while cruising, and then reduces the force to stop. The filter causes
the motion to start and stop more rapidly while not changing the cruising
rate. The velocity may actually become negative at the end of the motion
causing the cursor to "back up" slightly. This response causes the cursor to
be more responsive without loss of control.

And this parent describes the Trackpoints special force => velocity transfer
function:

Method of controlling the velocity of a cursor of a video screen

US 5764219 A

>Input force applied on a pointing device (51) having outputs (x,y) is related
to the velocity of a cursor on a video screen according to a transfer function
(FIG. 2) substantially described by a parabolic sigmoid function, thus
resulting in adapting the force/velocity relationship to accommodate human
perception and motor control limitations and task specific coordination
problems.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US5764219?dq=ininventor:%22Ed...](https://www.google.com/patents/US5764219?dq=ininventor:%22Edwin+J.+Selker%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Lwo8VdWjOsXPOvsd&ved=0CEYQ6AEwBjgK)

------
rifung
I love the idea of not having to take your hands away from the keyboard, but
not having used a trackpoint for any extended period of time am worried about
whether sustained use will cause any sort of pain.

Could anyone comment on this? I've been thinking of getting an ergonomic mouse
already but this seems like an interesting option since it'll save desk space
as well.

~~~
organsnyder
I've had TrackPoint (and clone) laptops for the past 13 years, starting with
my laptop I had for college (a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) and now a ThinkPad
T-410.

The TrackPoint-clone on the Fujitsu definitely gave me pain in my right index
finger—pain that lingers, I believe, to this day. I ended up switching to an
external mouse because of it. However, that pointer was small and required a
lot of force (even at the highest sensitivity).

Since I still have lingering pain from the Fujitsu, I still find myself using
the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad less than I otherwise probably would, and I
rarely use it with my right index finger. However, I've noticed no further ill
effects. The combination of touchpad and TrackPoint is actually really nice—I
often find myself scrolling with the touchpad with my right hand while my left
hand is moving the cursor with the TrackPoint.

I use a trackball on my desk—not only does it save space, but I've definitely
noticed a reduction in wrist pain since I began using it.

------
digi_owl
For a short while some mobile devices sported a optical "trackball". Basically
a small square that did with your finger what an optical mouse do with a desk
surface.

I have sometimes wondered if it would work to embed such a device in the same
position as one find the trackpoint.

------
krylon
Most awesome input device ever. I wish it was standard on all keyboards.

