gnu (01/09/83)
J. L. Dvorak (any relation to the keyboard?) at hogpc!3216jld wanted info about mouse suppliers. Here's the one we use... Mouse Systems Corporation 655 S. Fairoaks Ave, Suite D-313 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 (408) 730-2132 This is Steve Kirsch's mouse company (formerly Rodent Associates, which name I liked better). He designed and built an excellent optical mouse, a prototype of which was shown at Siggraph 82 in the Sun booth. The production model is rectangular with a sloped top and has three buttons. It slides on felt feet on a "mouse pad" which is a sheet of aluminum with colored tracking lines printed on it. There are no moving parts; it tracks by shining LED's on the lines. An 8748 single chip micro (same as in every keyboard in the world) inside the mouse watches the lines go by and sends delta-x and delta-y info to the computer over a 1200-baud serial line. The buttons are large and have that Micro Switch "click" for positive aural feedback. The mouse connects to its host with an RJ-11 (modular telephone) plug using 3 wires: power, ground, and data. There is an optional RS232 conversion box that has the RJ11 on one end and standard RS232 (the usual horrid klunky 25-pin connector) on the other end. Since the Sun Workstation mouse input port was originally designed to work with mechanical mice, which provide 7 bits of parallel input, our MSC mice are non-standard in that they provide 7-bit parallel input on a DB-15 connector, instead of 1200 baud serial on an RJ-11. The information sent by the MSC mouse is NOT the same as the simple graycodes sent by mechanical mice, but is binary delta values and button samples. We tried various mechanical mice, including Hawley (Hawley Labs, Berkeley -- original Xerox mouse suppliers) and Symbolics (the Lisp Machine folks -- somewhere in the Boston area?). The Hawley was expensive and had lots of little thin wires touching spinning drums, custom-machined tricky parts, etc. The Symbolics didn't track well at all. We also tried a Swiss mouse which was fairly reasonable mechanically, but we had import problems (thanks, U.S. Government) and could have had trouble getting enough production mice soon. The MSC mouse is cheap and utterly reliable. I've never seen the production version mis-track, and mistracking in prototypes was always caused by (my) failing host system software. We've never had a delivered mouse fail in operation (tho we don't have a thousands of hours on them yet). Steve has built a very fine mouse -- the world's first commercial optical mouse. He deserves your business. (Tell him sun!gnu sent you.) John Gilmore, Sun Microsystems