boylan@dicomed.UUCP (Chris Boylan) (06/03/84)
Here are a couple of much edited responses to my query on mice.
My thanks to the many people who responded to me and to the
individual who posted the list of vendors to the network.
Has anyone any good references to the ergonomics of mouse
use? I would hate to have to actually search the liturature ...
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We use Summagraphics "SummaMice" here on our apollos. They cost
around $300 and plug into RS232. They are optical mice, and can
emulate the popular Bitpad-1 protocol.
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The Dynamic Graphics Project at Univ. of Toronto has a Mouse Systems
optical mouse which I've successfully interfaced to an IBM PC via an RS232
port. Mouse Systems also sells driver software for the PC, though it wasn't
available when we got it so I wrote my own and it wasn't hard-- so it
should be fairly easy to interface to pretty much anything via an RS232 port.
It is MUCH less than $500-- it lists at $295 and I think I've seen it being
sold for $249 in discount stores (US dollars).
As the ad (in pretty much any issue of "PC") says, for more details contact
Mouse Systems, 2336H Walsh Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95051 (408) 988-0211
or Telex 467848.
It's a pretty decent product. I had a few problems getting it to work
in the mode in which it reports the rotation of the mouse (it has 2
sensors-- usually one is not used; just kept as a backup-- so it can
sense rotation) but I didn't pursue this as we didn't need it, so I
might have been doing something wrong.
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Chris Boylan
{mgnetp | ihnp4 | uwvax}!dicomed!boylan