20 Years Ago, Microsoft introduced its optical mouse

I&#x27;ve been using the same Microsoft Optical USB mouse at work since 2008. It&#x27;s so heavily used that the textured plastic has been polished completely smooth where my hand touches it. It&#x27;s great and I hope it never fails.<p>Also...<p>&gt;and a desktop workstation that while powerful at the time, would be laughable today (16MB of RAM baby!).<p>16MB of RAM would have been laughable in a workstation in 1999 as well. The fairly basic family Dell we got in 1998 came with 32MB. The budget gaming PC I built in 2000 had 128MB. A powerful workstation in 1999 would have had 256MB.

I don&#x27;t remember the mechanical mice being bad. I cleaned them every few months, not every fifteen minutes, and the cursor dragged or jumped occasionally, not constantly. For me, the laser mouse was an incremental improvement rather than the game changer this article claims. Am I the only one?

Microsoft may have changed mice (I loved almost all their Intellimouse incarnations, and most of their other PC hardware like the awesome Sidewinder game controllers) but I find Apple&#x27;s Magic Mouse to be closer to the ideal.<p>It&#x27;s a multitouch surface with several independent axes of control: Moving the mouse itself on the desk, swiping your fingers anywhere on the surface, tapping the surface, pressing the surface, with different effects depending on the number of fingers, the direction of the swipe gestures or which side you tap&#x2F;press on (emulating left and right buttons.)<p>The body&#x2F;shape may not be everyone&#x27;s cup of cacao and I still prefer the discrete steps of a physical mouse wheel when scrolling through content like a list of images (because they fly too many at a time with swipe gestures), but for everything else you can&#x27;t beat the flexibility of a touch surface, especially when panning through 360° content which a 1-axis wheel can&#x27;t do well, even with &quot;tilt-scrolling.&quot;<p>A Magic Mouse with &quot;taptic&quot; feedback (with the optional sensation of discrete buttons under your fingers) may be the perfection we seek.<p>If you find the default set of options and gestures too limiting there&#x27;s BetterTouchTool [1] which lets power users customize Apple&#x27;s input devices including the Touch Bar.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;ae&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;MLA02ZM&#x2F;A&#x2F;magic-mouse-2-silver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;ae&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;MLA02ZM&#x2F;A&#x2F;magic-mouse-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folivora.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;folivora.ai</a>

I remember when my school got a handful of Macintosh computers in the early 90s.<p>My friend&#x27;s mom came into the classroom for a parent day shortly after, and I remember my friend asking her to try out this new cool thing.<p>When he was showing her the mouse and keyboard, she picked up the mouse and rolled the little rubber ball on the underside around with her finger to move the cursor.<p>We all got a kick out of it at the time. Now that I have young children, I wonder what my moment of &quot;don&#x27;t really get how this is supposed to work&quot; will be when my kids show me some new technology.

I didn&#x27;t really enjoy that article because I find it to thin on technical history and engineering.<p>It&#x27;s mostly about one man&#x27;s experience with buying a computer mouse.

The TI Explorer LISP machine from the 1980s had an optical mouse. What I recall about the Microsoft mouse is that it was a broadly available <i>affordable</i> optical mouse. I have vivid memories cleaning my Amiga mouse with a Velcro ball and pad contraption.

I was so excited when they announced that they were bringing this back as the IntelliMouse Classic. It&#x27;s amazing how much they got right that most mice today don&#x27;t get right.

I think my first experience with an optical mouse was on a Data General unix workstation around 1990 or so. It needed a special pad; the pad was metal and had a grid pattern on it. The mouse was somewhat less responsive than ball mice at the time.

I still use the original cream Intellimouse Optical [1] and have bought a stash of them for the future. I’m yet to find anything as ergonomic to use<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluetoothmousetech.com&#x2F;microsoft-intellimouse-optical-1-1a-gaming-mouse-white?___store=uk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluetoothmousetech.com&#x2F;microsoft-intellimouse-opt...</a>

I got one of these when it first came out. It cost something like $45cdn, which was absurd at the time for just a basic mouse, but it was so worth it never to have to clean that ball thing again. It worked just great until about 5 or 6 years ago when it was destroyed in a fire.

For me it was Logitech that forever changed my mousing experience somewhere in early 2000. Their Logitech Optical USB mouse (this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Original-Logitech-Optical-Mouse-Buttons&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00S6CHX9U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Original-Logitech-Optical-Mouse-But...</a>) was the first optical mouse on the market here. It was outrageously expensive for my teenager budget, but with a USB-to-PS&#x2F;2 adapter and some Windows utility to tweak the OS refresh rate it gave me a real advantage in Unreal Tournament. No more gunk messing up accuracy. I used it for years and if I’d still have it, I don’t doubt that it would still work.

I have been using a series Intellimouse 1.1 Opticals since the early 2000&#x27;s but they are getting harder to find now.<p>Even when sold &quot;new&quot; now (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newegg.com&#x2F;Product&#x2F;Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826105122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newegg.com&#x2F;Product&#x2F;Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682610...</a>) they seem to be old stock or factory seconds and do not sit level or have one or more broken buttons.<p>Any suggestions for a replacement? The new Intellimouse Classic does not have the right side button.

I recall using that 3-button SPARC mouse on a rigid, semi-reflective, gridded mouse pad, and also a Logitech optical trackball, with patterned black dots on a red marble, long before optical mouse tech could work on any surface.<p>If you waited until the MS Intellimouse to go optical to relieve your Photoshop woes, you weren&#x27;t being very proactive. I even recall using a Wacom stylus-tablet, and I wasn&#x27;t even a graphics creator or manipulator.<p>I&#x27;d argue that those mouses from around 2000 with the vibration motors in them were more revolutionary to mousing, as it allowed for cheap haptic feedback. It&#x27;s really too bad the TouchSense tech wasn&#x27;t licensed loosely enough by Immersion to get more than annoying toy applications for it to alter your desktop experience (and Black &amp; White). Every time I get a little vibration bump through my finger on a touchscreen, I remember that could have already been everywhere 15 years ago.

In the old days the most under appreciated Microsoft division was Microsoft Hardware. Keyboards and mice were top notch.

I started to use an Anker[0] mouse few years (1-2?) ago for work and I can&#x27;t turn back.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;B018LR04B8&#x2F;ref=psdcmw_11036491_t1_B07CT9X48L" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;aw&#x2F;d&#x2F;B018LR04B8&#x2F;ref=psdcmw_1103649...</a>

No mouse discussion would be complete without mention of the greatest mouse ever made, the Logitech MX Revolution. Logitech would truly outshine themselves if they merged the MX Revolution and the G602.

I was just thinking about how much I miss cleaning compacted dirt off of the wheels inside of my mouse. It was so satisfying.<p>edit: not being sarcastic at all. I actually miss the cleaning.

I am left-handed and the IntelliMouse Optical was my favorite mouse. It broke after a couple of years and then I just bought three of them in bulk packaging for the same price!<p>Today, I use the SteelSeries Sensei models which kind of are modern versions of this mouse: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steelseries.com&#x2F;gaming-mice&#x2F;sensei-raw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steelseries.com&#x2F;gaming-mice&#x2F;sensei-raw</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19778672" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19778672</a>

I&#x27;m still using that exact same mouse. It&#x27;s my lucky programming mouse I&#x27;ve been using since 2008.

I remember being pretty good at scraping the hardened goo off the rollers with my finger nail.

I remember paying some ridiculous amount for an intellimouse explorer in 1999 or so, and being so thrilled (and baffled) that Microsoft provided drivers for it.<p>Fantastic mouse. I still have it, though it started having some issues

We also forget that in 1999, Microsoft was a massive monopoly that consumed everything in the tech industry... Now innovation comes from all directions, the tech industry can breathe!

Anecdotally I am convinced at best they changed how we mouse for about 15 years, if indeed a significant portion of people still mouse.

Just reminded me the asheron&#x27;s call developer named devilmouse.

&gt; (Tabs hadn’t been invented yet.)<p>Wow, so true.

I remember this!

And to this day their OS still considers the scroll wheel on top of it to be part of the keyboard.

I abandoned windows on my home machines because of a Microsoft mouse.<p>I had bought a new asus netbook. I intended to put linux on it but it came with some sort of student edition of windows. I thought I&#x27;d at least see how well ran out of the box. So I plugged in my decade-old and trustworthy MS mouse. &quot;Need to connected to internet to download drive for external mouse&quot; ... windows was then dead to me.