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The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Career

62 points by srikar 12y ago

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I love this because it largely debunks the theme that apple simply "stole" the the mouse in a copy-paste fashion. In fact, this article does a great job describing a core capability of engineers: taking something complicated and making it simpler by using other principles.
jtheory 12y ago
Neat. And it's a curious feeling to stumble upon memories I haven't touched in years -- I used to love idly disassembling computer mice, cleaning out fuzz and gunk from the little rollers and the ball, and putting them back together. It was one of things I had to consciously stop myself from doing if I was sitting at someone else's desk. Optical mice have been around so long now, I had completely forgotten how they used to work, and that odd little pleasure of maintaining a simple mechanical device. Edit: this confuses me, though: The basic approach — pairing a freely-rolling ball with a optoelectronic system — was used by generations of mice that followed, changing only incrementally until optical mice did away with trackballs altogether. Is that right? The mice I was always taking apart normally detected the motion of the trackball with two little white rollers, for Y and X motion. That's neither of these systems.
- rjsw 12y ago
  In all the mice that I have seen the position of the rollers is detected by an optoelectronic sensor on each of them.
- dammitcoetzee 12y ago
  Yes, that's right. The little rollers were on an axle that extended a bit further terminating into a spoked disk which sat in the middle of an optical detector and emitter pair. It used some tricks to figure out when the mouse was going forward and when it was going backward (quadrature), but mostly it just counts the pulses of light it sees and turns that into displacement coordinates. EDIT: Wikipedia has a pretty good picture of this and a better explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Mechanical_mice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Mechanical_mi...
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    I thought the holes in the disk were in Grey code? Maybe that reduces to quadrature in small cases
    - joezydeco 12y ago
      The encoder disc is really a 1-dimensional input. Adding a second opto-detector that is one half-bit out of phase gives you two simultaneous inputs and yes, it comes out to a 2-bit Grey code. 00 -> 01 -> 11 -> 10 -> 00
    - dammitcoetzee 12y ago
      Quadrature is a gray code with two offset spoke sets so that you can tell direction and rotation by which pulse precedes the other. http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4763/en/ http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4763/en/
pascal_cuoq 12y ago
There is a mine of documents related to the Apple mouse at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html
teddyh 12y ago
> He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job. Would that not have been patented? Did Apple licence it from Atari? If they did, they were lucky that Atari allowed it – Atari might simply have denied Apple a license. EDIT: Replace “Atari” with “whoever owned the patent”.
- jacobolus 12y ago
  I’m pretty sure this design for trackballs dates back quite a bit before the Atari trackballs he was looking at for inspiration. You’d have to go do a patent search to figure out exactly who invented it and when.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Apple's mouse patent cites US 3,625,083 which was filed in 1969 by Singer. https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083 https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083 Military tech historians note that the trackball was in use much earlier than this for radar tracking systems, but it was kept in secret.
  - danelectro 12y ago
    In my case I just used the Atari trackball to point & click (& drag) for my own purposes when programming my regular Atari in early 1982. About 5years later when mouses started to become popular because popular PC software began mouse support, it really didn't seem that novel by then.
teddyh 12y ago
> The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. This was certainly not a new insight – it was clearly explained in 1968 in the “Mother of all Demos” by Douglas Engelbart, where the original computer mouse was first introduced. This insight is what enabled the mouse to even exist – previous similar devices were known as digitizer boards and were strictly tied to their pads – they were one integrated unit. The very idea of a mouse device by itself is absolutely dependent on this insight that precise accuracy is not necessary.

62 points by srikar 12y ago

I love this because it largely debunks the theme that apple simply "stole" the the mouse in a copy-paste fashion. In fact, this article does a great job describing a core capability of engineers: taking something complicated and making it simpler by using other principles.

jtheory 12y ago

Neat. And it's a curious feeling to stumble upon memories I haven't touched in years -- I used to love idly disassembling computer mice, cleaning out fuzz and gunk from the little rollers and the ball, and putting them back together. It was one of things I had to consciously stop myself from doing if I was sitting at someone else's desk. Optical mice have been around so long now, I had completely forgotten how they used to work, and that odd little pleasure of maintaining a simple mechanical device. Edit: this confuses me, though: The basic approach — pairing a freely-rolling ball with a optoelectronic system — was used by generations of mice that followed, changing only incrementally until optical mice did away with trackballs altogether. Is that right? The mice I was always taking apart normally detected the motion of the trackball with two little white rollers, for Y and X motion. That's neither of these systems.

rjsw 12y ago
In all the mice that I have seen the position of the rollers is detected by an optoelectronic sensor on each of them.
dammitcoetzee 12y ago
Yes, that's right. The little rollers were on an axle that extended a bit further terminating into a spoked disk which sat in the middle of an optical detector and emitter pair. It used some tricks to figure out when the mouse was going forward and when it was going backward (quadrature), but mostly it just counts the pulses of light it sees and turns that into displacement coordinates. EDIT: Wikipedia has a pretty good picture of this and a better explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Mechanical_mice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing)#Mechanical_mi...
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  I thought the holes in the disk were in Grey code? Maybe that reduces to quadrature in small cases
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    The encoder disc is really a 1-dimensional input. Adding a second opto-detector that is one half-bit out of phase gives you two simultaneous inputs and yes, it comes out to a 2-bit Grey code. 00 -> 01 -> 11 -> 10 -> 00
  - dammitcoetzee 12y ago
    Quadrature is a gray code with two offset spoke sets so that you can tell direction and rotation by which pulse precedes the other. http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4763/en/ http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4763/en/

pascal_cuoq 12y ago

There is a mine of documents related to the Apple mouse at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/mouse0.html

teddyh 12y ago

> He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job. Would that not have been patented? Did Apple licence it from Atari? If they did, they were lucky that Atari allowed it – Atari might simply have denied Apple a license. EDIT: Replace “Atari” with “whoever owned the patent”.

jacobolus 12y ago
I’m pretty sure this design for trackballs dates back quite a bit before the Atari trackballs he was looking at for inspiration. You’d have to go do a patent search to figure out exactly who invented it and when.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Apple's mouse patent cites US 3,625,083 which was filed in 1969 by Singer. https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083 https://www.google.com/patents/US3625083 Military tech historians note that the trackball was in use much earlier than this for radar tracking systems, but it was kept in secret.
- danelectro 12y ago
  In my case I just used the Atari trackball to point & click (& drag) for my own purposes when programming my regular Atari in early 1982. About 5years later when mouses started to become popular because popular PC software began mouse support, it really didn't seem that novel by then.

teddyh 12y ago

> The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. This was certainly not a new insight – it was clearly explained in 1968 in the “Mother of all Demos” by Douglas Engelbart, where the original computer mouse was first introduced. This insight is what enabled the mouse to even exist – previous similar devices were known as digitizer boards and were strictly tied to their pads – they were one integrated unit. The very idea of a mouse device by itself is absolutely dependent on this insight that precise accuracy is not necessary.