Logitech Ships 500 Millionth Mouse 559
ipxodi writes "Logitech marks the milestone of 500 million shipped mice. Mice first widely appeared in consumer form on the original Macintosh, but have appeared in various forms back through time to 1964 when they were invented by Doug Englebart.
My favorite mouse is also my current mouse, a Logitech Optical Wheel mouse. I also remember some oddities beyond the old bar-of-soap shaped mice of the mid 80's, like one with a crosshair attachment for clicking on specific points of a blueprintfor CAD input.
What's your favorite current or past mouse?" My first mouse was back in 1987, for my Apple //c. It cost $50, and came with a double-sided floppy that contained an interactive instructional program on side one, and MousePaint (a port of MacPaint) on side two. Memories!
Ah, the Apple //c mouse. (Score:2, Interesting)
-uso.
Logitech Marble Mouse (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a mouse per se (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite input device is my Kensington Turbo Mouse. It's a trackball, but I have been using them for years going back to the original 1.0. They are great in reducing RSI and allow precise control which is important for digital imagery work and image forensics.
My faivoraite mouse (Score:0, Interesting)
Logitech TrackMan Marble Wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
Best... Mouse... Ever... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't use a mouse, you insensitive clod! (Score:3, Interesting)
But the truth is that I don't use a mouse anymore. I use a touchstream keyboard from Fingerworks [fingerworks.com] that lets me move the arrow and cursor and type on the same interface. This is very nice.
Anyone who has even a bit of RSI can identify with my hatred, or at least ambivilance toward mice. My tendons ache at the thought of so many mice in the world..
Put it on the left (Score:2, Interesting)
The number pad on the right of most keyboards puts the mouse to far over to be realy comfortable.
Plus, for you FPS fans, it's very handy to have your right hand on the number pad and the left on the mouse. If you re-map the keys you never have to move to any other section of the keyboard.
I allways laughed at those special keypads for playing games... you've alread got one, just move your mouse over 18 inches.
(for full discloser I am left handed, but it was a righty that showed me the light)
My mice... (Score:3, Interesting)
My current "mouse" is a Logitech Marble FX trackball. It has got to be the most comfortable pointing device I have ever used, and I like the ability to simply pull my fingers away, and the cursor doesn't move, even when I click the buttons. I could never get that from a mouse, clicking always caused me to move a bit this way or that.
Re:I have the Logitech optical too (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably not, but I'd like to see them vanish.
For delicate work, such as purely digital drawing, mice force the user to use the whole wrist and arm, rather than far more dextrous fingers. For coarse work like web browsing, mice far exceed the precision needed.
I'd like a wireless optical thimble, myself - A sort of finger-cap that tracks the surface you place it on, and you can tap your finger to click. Far better for art, and far lighter and less encumbering for "normal" work. Alas, I don't think such a devce exists.
Apple ADB Mouse (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Logitech Marble Mouse (Score:5, Interesting)
Best "mouse" I've ever owned. Who needs mousepads?!
Mouse designed by famouse Anime artist - nice... (Score:3, Interesting)
Link to my not-quite-ready-yet site - maybe 7 days premature but whatever, it's been a long day at the office.
Cheers.
blakespot
Old-school optical mice (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike the modern opticals, however, the early ones didn't let you use any old surface as a mouse pad. They came with special metal mouse pads with a tiny grid of shiny and not-as-shiny areas for the mouse to track. Get the pad too scratched or dented and your mouse started working funny. I liked the pads though, having your mouse on a futuristic metal surface instead of the usual felt-covered rubber was all part of the charm.
Amstrad 1512 mouse (Score:2, Interesting)
Mine was the mouse that came with the Amstrad 1512 [digidome.nl] , europes first really affordable mouse orientated PC clone. Ah, running GEM off a single 360K FD (no HD).. And that nice clunky mouse cursor when you ran the QBASIC 2.0 compiler..
Re:demo of the first mouse (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wuss (Score:3, Interesting)
No ball, no sticking, no cleaning
:(
They lie! My main bitch about the optical mice I've used is that because they are sliding around generally on the desk without a mousepad the feet that they glide on get horribly gummed up from dust and whatever random junk ends up on your desk, making them stick and feel like they give me far worse control than my venerable old MS OEM ball mouse which slides along it's 3m mousepad and has a ball that requires far less cleaning than my optical mouses feet
Re:500 Million Mice, and I know where most are... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's only a violation of the laws of physics if it happens in a closed system. In this case, the mice at some point probably borrowed all this order from elsewhere (now left in complete disorder)... that elsewhere possibly being Darl McBride's brain.
when will they bring out a good Bluetooth mouse? (Score:3, Interesting)
MousePaint not a port of MacPaint (Score:2, Interesting)
Look at the title bar of the window, and the items in the menu bar, and then look at some screen shots of the Apple Lisa.
The giveaways: The File menu is called "File/Print" and the stripes in the window title bar are vertical, not horizontal as on the Mac.
(My first mouse was for my Apple
Also the chord-board (Score:3, Interesting)
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Heavily modded Logitech. (Score:4, Interesting)
Inertia wheel. I removed the clickety-click mechanism of the wheel, and ordered a metal replacement for the rubber band - a pretty heavy iron ring. Now with a single strong push I may scroll 20-30 pages (while seeing them all as they scroll by!) and stop by putting my finger against the spinning wheel when I see the section I've been looking for. Causes some problems in games (like unwanted weapons switching) but is absolutely superb when it comes to websurfing and all no-game work. BTW, assign "fire" to "mouse up" and you get instant autofire
Thumb RMB. Since the inertia wheel is slightly bigger than the original one, I can't use it as middle mouse button. All the better, I've placed one in the side of the mouse, under my thumb. It's VERY comfortable. Far more than the wheel was. No moving fingers from button to button, just press with thumb and get things pasted
And prettifiers... Some plastic that is used in "emergency route" labels and shines in the darkness, around the wheel, to mask the hole edges and an op amp tapped into data lines and powered from the power lines with output to a LED placed under the thumb button, blinking on any mouse activity.
Look Ma, No Keyboard! (Score:1, Interesting)
Back in 1981 I used a system called DNLS at an Air Force base in Alabama. The system was connected to a large DEC mainframe and consisted of a regular terminal with a bulky mechanical 3-button mouse with huge metal wheels on the bottom used t o track X and Y axis movement and accompanied by a device with 5 levers that sat under your non-mouse hand that was used to enter text. The idea roughly was that you could position the cursor anywhere on an 80x24 screen and enter or modify any text on the screen with the keyset using a 5-bit binary code for each letter. It was conceivable to perform work without having to touch the keyboard!
Talk about being on the leading edge...
Re:crosshairs? (Score:3, Interesting)
The other thing that mice are really great compared to digitizers is that cursor acceleration can be implemented in a very transparent manner. On a pad, you generally want a more linear tracking function, for those people and apps that actually involve looking at where the device is (for tracing or entering points). I guess you could have a sort of relative pointing mode on the tablet for mouse simulation if you really wanted to.
Certainly the sophistication of what you can do with a modern tablet like a Wacom is pretty amazing. The latest ones detect and transmit pressure at the tip, it can independently track both ends of the stylus (so you can have "ink" on one end and an "eraser" on the other in your favorite paint program). With the ability to track both ends, there are some tricky apps that even read the slant of the pen and take action based on that - not that I've ever been able to do anything useful with that function.
Re:I have one of the original mice (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things he mentioned was that instead of a mouseball, his original mouse used two orthogonal wheels arranged in an L-shape. If you tilted the mouse, it would rest on only one of the wheels. Depending on which wheel it was resting, you then could move the mouse perfectly horizontally or vertically.
This would be kind of useful in CAD work. Modern mice don't do this, although I guess nowadays it's easier and more accurate to restrict movement via software.
A former colleague had only Doug-autographed mouse (Score:3, Interesting)
Doug duly autographed it - and mentioned that this was the first time anybody had asked him. (This was in the late '80s or early '90s, so it wasn't like nobody had had the opportunity.)
So at that point he had the only Engelbart-autographed mouse. (And even if somebody else has asked since - which the rest of us didn't to avoid me-too ism and maintain the value of HIS mouse - he still has the first.)