Jack Hawley's Unstoppable Computer Mouse

the history of the computer mouse is a little unusual compared to a lot of technologies because of how quickly it went from a prototype an idea someone had to essentially the finished design that would endure for decades the ball mouse which we were all using in the 80s and 90s goes back even further than that probably a lot further than most people realize in fact it's almost the only design that ever existed which is remarkable it makes a lot of other industries look bad consider the automobile for instance early cars were absolutely baffling compared to modern ones if you were to sit down in a 1914 model t ford i promise you would not be able to get the car to roll not without somebody to teach you how to drive it none of the controls remotely resemble what we have in cars now other than the steering wheel there's no clutch pedal there's no gas pedal there's a reverse pedal you would be completely lost it was not in fact until about 1916 almost 30 years after the first production automobile rolled out of the factory that they finally produced a car that you could drive the same way you drive a car now you could say it took them that long to figure out how to do it right that's debatable there are some neat features in older cars but a big problem with them as i understand it is that they were all different just because you could drive a model t didn't mean you could drive a mercedes the mouse conversely moved very quickly the earliest well-known design was invented by douglas engelbart who worked at the stanford research institute in 1968 and we actually have footage of him using it from 1968. he did a presentation that year that's been retroactively called the mother of all demos for good reason it's muddy and kind of hard to make out what's going on we're not going to dwell on it but i recommend you go check this out if you have some time because what he's doing in here is incredible this guy albeit not single-handedly had invented a multi-user graphical collaborative computing system with hypertext basically wikipedia in the late 60s it's super badass but in order for it to be possible he had to invent the mouse so that's what he did just just did that just went and invented the mouse his design was very different from what became standard here's a picture of the bottom you can see there's no ball instead there's a pair of discs protruding through the base plate i couldn't find any great pictures or videos of this thing in use so i've built a model so here's the two wheels you see through the bottom of the mouse this one's for vertical movement this one's for horizontal if we set this on the table top as i move it forward and back or up and down the vertical one rotates and as we move it horizontally the lateral one rotates and if i move it at an angle both of them rotate simultaneously corresponding to their component of the motion so if we move at a slightly more obtuse angle then this one rotates less so if we were to put rotary encoders on the back side of each of these wheels then as they turned they would produce pulses corresponding to how far and how fast the mouse has moved in that direction congratulations you've just built a ball mouse but with wheels now inglebart's mouse didn't work like that instead of rotary encoders he used potentiometers these guys variable resistors as you turn the shaft the resistance changes and by measuring that you can determine where the mouse is left to right but they usually have a limited range there's a maximum and a minimum so i have to assume that englebart's mouse didn't work like modern ones where you can just move it indefinitely presumably once it got to a certain point on the mouse pad you had to pick it up and move it to the right in order to reset its position so these mice not only looked different and were made different but behaved differently than the mice were all used to while inglebart is regarded probably correctly as the single reason that we all have mice on our desks nowadays he was not actually the first person to invent one now i'm not the kind of person to say that whoever first had an idea was the person who deserves all the credit but i probably don't need to tell you the inglebart's design had some flaws i'm glad that it did not become the enduring template that all mice were based on that honor seems to go to the german company telefunken who produced a mouse in the same year like three weeks before doug engelbart's demo supposedly that works pretty much just like the ball mice we're familiar with it's got a ball it's got a pair of shafts it rides on and it has a couple rotary encoders that produce pulses they just tweeted it out ostensibly they independently developed this idea based on a trackball that some engineer had seen the trackball concept had been around for a couple years prior to the mouse although i don't think it was really used in anything the general public knew about so it makes sense that englebart probably had never seen one and it also makes sense that these people at telefunken saw one and thought hey what if you just flipped it over this is at least the wikipedia timeline i prefer to double check these things but you'll forgive me in this case all the refs are in german unsurprisingly the telefunken design seems to have been the one that got cloned and just a couple years later in 1973 xerox was shipping their alto computers with a ball mouse so there were at most five years between the invention of the mouse as a concept and the development of the style of mouse that we would end up using for 30 years after that that's fast for engineering if only everything could be like that but the design wasn't perfect even xerox one of the first companies to ship a mouse at all was trying to move away from that design almost immediately by 1981 their star work station was shipping with an optical mouse the first design in history that i'm aware of although it shares that honor with the mouse systems design which i showed briefly a few videos back they both came out the same year apparently which suggests that there was a strong desire to get away from the ball almost as soon as it had been invented the optical mouse was desirable for obvious reasons it didn't get dirty and ball mice at this time were apparently plagued by dirt issues even more than the ones we had in the 90s apparently the encoders they used rather than being optical were actually electrical and they tended to get gummed up much more easily the optical mouse solved the dirt problem pretty much perfectly with the only cost being that you had to use the weird mouse pads well that and probably cost i keep not researching this but i'm pretty sure optical mice were really expensive because they didn't become consumer available for 18 years after they were invented not until microsoft put out the intel mouse optical in 1999. it must have been a price thing nothing else makes sense thinking about the components in a ball mouse versus an optical i think that's a safe bet so if this is all true then well the narrative looks pretty simple now right the mechanical mouse was an interesting idea in the 70s but it was obsolete before almost any of us saw it for all its victories the ball mouse was the cheap option and things were being done the right way for people who had the money to spend we were condemned to scraping crap off our mouse rollers every day and the only light at the end of the tunnel was the possibility of someday getting away from mechanical designs entirely but it could have been a little different there could have been one more chapter in between this and that and one man tried to make it happen it's not clear to me where this joker came from well a number of people involved in the early development of the mouse seem to have come from sri or related pursuits i can't figure out where jack hawley entered the mix this guy just seems to materialize in the early 70s as some kind of inventor bumming around california who got hired at xerox to help them continue the work from sri and produce a saleable product the end result of this work was the mouse that shipped with the alto apparently he also had some input on several later xerox mice and then in the early 80s he broke away from xerox and formed his own company called the mouse house to pursue just that product per his claims he enjoyed great success in 1983 he was saying that he was or could make tens of thousands of these things per year the mice he was producing were basically the same thing he'd made at xerox uh in fact the name was this cryptic model number x063x flip it over yeah he just called it the xerox the guy was shameless anyway as far as we're concerned he just kind of drops off the radar for a while i know during the 80s mouse systems was producing mice for major workstation vendors like sun but i'm not sure what the mouse house was doing this whole time nor do i really care it seems to me like jack hawley was maybe a bit of a huckster maybe not as successful as he let on he wasn't dumb though and he wasn't done with mechanical mice if we fast forward to 1986 we find him contracted to make a mouse for digital equipment corporation and it's a funny one weird puck-shaped thing kinda conjures up thoughts like what if apple made the imac in 1989 beyond the hilarity of that idea it just kind of looks like a weird three-button mouse until you flip it over what on earth is happening here aurora borealis at a glance this thing is a mystery if all i had was the jpeg there would be no point in even speculating on how it works there's just no information how could these two little flat disks do anything well if you're as curious as i am you could go buy one it's only 135 dollars on a good day or you could save a buck and keep watching since i've already got one or well i've got the honeywell design but it's the same thing he licensed it to both companies of course this one doesn't have the wacky apple 12 years too early look to it just your no frills ho-hum beige's beige sort of countenance however it does still have the same two wacky discs on the bottom so let's get to learning their ways and customs first point of order this is a serial mouse which means it'll work on virtually any pc here's some b-roll i shot where it's working on a pc there look at that the cursor moves around here it is in quake that's all the demonstration i'm going to do because it's a mouse and it mouses the what is not remarkable here it's the how we're interested in so let's take a close look up close you can see that both of these discs which are apparently properly called feet are made of enm that's extremely normal material in other words it's plastic it's not rubberized or anything it's just some kind of medium tooth hard polymer of no particular note both discs rotate when turned which i think we could have guessed however they do a little more than that they also push up into the body and spring back out and if we take a grazing view along the bottom you can see they're actually tilted one is tilted along the y-axis and the other is tilted along the x-axis things are probably coming clearer already this is essentially a reheated version of engelbart's mouse plus dipping sauces to save us some time i built a second model considerably weirder than the first so we set this against the table so both wheels are tilted and now when we move forward and back that one turns we move side to side that one turns and if we move at a diagonal both of them turn would you look at that it's sort of like moving a barrel by tilting it and then kicking it so it rolls its way forward except instead you're dragging it on its edge so that it rolls so this may look strange at first but once you understand how the engelbart mouse works it's the same thing just running on the side of the rim instead of the face let's take a look at the inside of the mechanism you may recall me saying in the q 500 review i'd never seen a mouse that went together with no fasteners at all congratulations jack hawley number two for the sake of comparison here's an ordinary pc ball mouse some microsoft and telemouse in fact but they all pretty much look the same inside you've got the ball itself and it rides on these two plastic shafts which are attached to disks that have notches in them the notches move between infrared transmitters and receivers so as the ball rotates the discs spin this produces pulses of infrared which the controller interprets to tell the computer how far and how fast the mouse has moved the holley mouse looks quite a bit different inside but isn't actually all that different still got most of the same parts there's your microcontroller some glue logic chip timing crystal buttons etc the only part that really differs are these two big plastic drums here and they look strange but they're actually rotary encoders as well when we get up close you can see there's actually notches cut around the perimeter of the barrel and it passes between an infrared transmitter receiver pair right here kind of tough to see but it's there so as this spins it produces pulses and those tell the microcontroller how far and fast it's moved so it's really the same mechanism but it just looks very odd because they're floating up here in midair and they're tilted since they are attached to the same shafts as the feet on the bottom of the mouse those are tilted so these have to be tilted this means that as you move the mouse around these drums just kind of spin in free space it makes me really uncomfortable on the other hand it's also kind of cool like i wish i had like an acrylic case for it some leds on the drums may put some spinning rims on them but anyway i think you'll agree that despite looking so strange on the outside it's actually a fairly conventional design it's just been rotated 90 degrees but there's got to be a wacky part right like i didn't come all this way just to show you a completely ordinary thing there's got to be a wacky part right yeah yeah there's a wacky part here it is i mentioned the feet can be pushed up into the body and then they spring back out right except there's no spring in there see there should be a spring like a tension spring cold up around the shaft in there or something like that but nothing there's nothing going on so how does this work well if you look very closely see that little sort of brownish reddish disc in there it's a magnet and there's a steel disc you just barely see it on the bottom of the inside of the drum here it's like a washer that's attracted to the magnet so when you push it up magnetic field pulls it back down this is actually less weird than holley's initial ideas if we take a look at the patent illustration this is a cross section where the shaft comes through the base plate of the mouse you can see there were originally two ring magnets one pulling towards the other this would have increased the amount of downward force considerably neat but the question is why i mean the spring action here that makes sense it preloads the foot basically increasing the amount of pressure pushing down on the surface decreases the probability it'll slip as you move the mouse that's reasonable but why use a magnet well the text of the patent actually addresses that as well it asserts that the conventional approach here would have been to use a thrust bearing presumably with a spring behind it and that's basically a pair of discs that can rotate independently and then the spring provides the downward force now those add some rolling resistance while the magnet approach adds basically none the shaft is essentially floating in free space when it's under load although it is rubbing against the sides of the little channel where it comes to the base plate of the mouse it does have less rolling resistance this way that's true i'm just not convinced it's necessary the forces involved are so minuscule i don't think that much friction really would have mattered i think he's kind of overdoing it here on the other hand a spring and a thrust bearing probably cost more than a pair of ring magnets i think that's the bigger issue and in this design we're only using one ring magnet and then basically a washer so that's even cheaper again i get the impression jack hawley was a bit of a huckster magnets could also be harmful right with all the floppy disks hanging around back then on the other hand it's a small magnet it's not a rare earth type and you know inverse cube fall off it was probably fine it's just an idiosyncratic way to do it wacky magnet springs aside this thing is not all that remarkable i mean yeah you might not pick up on what it is instantly but you turn around your hands couple of minutes and you can see how someone could get from here to there with just a real good weekend think the question is why do it what's this get you knowing that jack hawley was working off the original sri designs when he made his first mice we can assume that he'd been walking around for years with the idea bumping around in his head of doing something different with inglebart's original mouse design and finally he came up with this but i mean it was a little too late right if he'd done it in 1971 when the ball mouse was still gaining traction or 76 when no consumers had one yet then maybe would have been interesting but 86 when millions of consumers had these on their desks and they were evolved refined reliable products why bother simple question what was the matter with the ball mouse we could debate we could nitpick there's only one real answer dirt it's their defining quality the things are never clean they pick up everything they roll over pull it right up into the body and smash it into the rollers unfortunately i can demonstrate this using glitter although i will now have to burn down my studio it was worth it for the vine you can see the horrific hell dust get pulled right up into the body of the mouse where you can trust it'll get deposited every damn place and never come out ball mice do the same thing with dust and human skin oil over time it builds up on the rollers into a disgusting brown crust that you have to clean off with q-tips and alcohol or if you're a more normal type computer gremlin scrape off revoltingly with whatever you have at hand this situation had actually improved since the 70s when apparently you had to have tons of spare mice on hand to use while others were being cleaned hence the strong push for the optical mouse to be developed as quickly as possible but in 1986 when the optical mouse was still not affordable for most people and ball mice were still having problems with dirt jack hawley invented a mechanical mouse that didn't get dirty the standout feature of the holly mouse as described in its patent is that it does not pull dirt up into the body as the foot turns the surface that contacts the desk spins around outside the mouse it never goes inside the only opening in the bottom of the mouse is a tiny hole for the drive shaft so no way for dirt to get in dirt don't get in rolling this one over the satanic powder unsurprisingly nothing gets inside i can roll it around as much as i want and it should never work its way inside unless the tolerances of the shaft bearing aren't as good as i think they are [Music] and even if the feet themselves eventually get caked up with some kind of sludge they're on the outside so cleaning them is much easier than a ball mouse no disassembly just wet a paper towel scrub it back and forth and you're ready to go this patent is outright hubristic i mean it goes so far as to suggest that this mouse will work on surfaces including oiled teflon i've used some mice in some weird situations but that's not gonna work that's jack hawley being a huckster so let's prove it this here is a sheet of vhmwpe that's very high molecular weight polyethylene the local tap plastic store was out of polytetrafluoroethylene aka teflon but i talked to the manager about my plan and he said this stuff would serve as a reasonable stand-in i then told him i was going to oil it and we agreed that the negligible differences in material properties would probably be okay and here's our oil now i didn't use something like vegetable oil because i figure even in like a machine shop setting unless you're using the mouse in a stream of coolant you're probably not likely to run into something quite that heavy and i think it would actually gum up the mouse and destroy my only specimen what fun is that i think a light machine oil like this is more representative of what you're going to find on surfaces around say a cnc controller which is probably closer to holley's intent now i've never tried this before so you get to see in real time who has more hubris me or jack first let's see if it tracks at all okay looks like it does all right with the vhfw and well here we go all right that's good and disgusting can we oh that stuff doesn't run so much well let's smear it around shall we yeah there we go all right if you can see that that's good and nasty right and the mouse still tracks oh boy that's wild hot damn yeah it's doing it it's this is the grossest thing i've ever done with a mouse i'm sure not all of us can make that claim so yeah uh i didn't expect it to pass that test and of course if we open it up it's gonna be perfectly clean inside i mean why wouldn't it be there's nowhere for oil to get in so this mouse really can operate soaking in oil can a ball mouse make that clean well let's find out all right does it work to begin with yes it does let's just go ahead and freshen the surface up here a little bit microsoft and telemouse i'm sure you served well during your life oh no oh my oh nothing nothing not a damn thing look at that the curse is completely oh oh there we go got a little bit a little bit a little when i pick it up it moves more than it does when i drag it across the surface that is wild you know i was ready for the holly mouse to do better than expected but i wasn't ready for the ball mouse to do catastrophically worse than expected it's completely wrecked well now is it wrecked you know curiously no it's not it's just not doing anything like the ball is dry see everything in there is still dry there's nothing on the encoders and there's nothing on the top of the ball the ball won't rotate as soon as it hits that oil it just stops dead so there's a little wet contact patch on the bottom and then the rest of it's dry so technically if you didn't do this for too long and why would you because the mouse isn't working then you could take it out and wipe it off so i guess it doesn't catastrophically fail but i gotta say i expected it to do something so holly had a point let's just double check with the extra oil i put on yeah like a champ just goes right through it this is the last sequence of the video that i'm shooting i'm doing this after everything else in case i ruined the mouse i did not expect this so my whole narrative assumed this mouse was not as badass as holly made it out to be i was wrong this thing's rad so forgive me if the rest of the video understates its accomplishments this is much cooler than i was prepared for the holley wheel mouse promises to be the ak-47 of mice indestructible and simple doesn't need a special pad no optical nonsense lose the dust cover drag it through the mud roll a tank over it then just give it a quick rinse and diesel and it's ready to fight again except you've probably never seen one which means it must not have been terribly popular what went wrong well it's probably just the tail as old as time scale by 1986 ball mice are being produced at such obscene scale that i really doubt they could compete on price the arithmetic always goes the same way you got two choices you buy something for sixty dollars special order it's built like an amc inline six or you buy something for three bucks you can get anywhere it's built like cheese breaks if you sneeze on it but you can buy a dozen of them for three bucks a pop when one breaks throw it away grab another one out the box when you run out go the store buy a dozen more for most people especially businesses it's an easy choice you get the one that you're going to be able to get again it's also a matter of marginal improvement sure this thing is more resistant to dirt but if you just clean your workspace up a little better all of a sudden it doesn't make sense to spend more on the mouse so it's probably just a matter of too little too late if this would come out five to eight years earlier maybe it would have had a chance but people probably took a look at it and said well that's not that much better than what we have but it's also possible they took a look at it and said that's worse than what we have the holly mouse being essentially returned to the original inglebart design also inherits its flaws because the wheels are not made out of highly grippy material they can slip and unfortunately they do under most circumstances the mouse tracks just fine but when moving at certain specific angles one or the other drum will seize up and stop turning it might be hard to see but here i'm moving the mouse at an angle a pretty obtuse one but definitely moving in two directions at once so both drums should be rotating but if you look closely you can see that one is slipping it's not always turning when it should be it's intermittently catching and then letting go this of course means the mouse cursor won't move as expected on the screen i have never taken a physics course so i have no idea why this is happening i'm thinking maybe it's because the perpendicular force on the shaft is causing it to jam against its bearing or maybe because breaking the kinetic friction in one dimension causes it to break in the other as well i'm not sure i'm talking out my ass the point is it happens i encountered it almost immediately when i started trying out this mouse and i think people would have noticed it in 1986 as well it would have particularly bugged people who were doing like little tiny micro adjustments like maybe in a cad app or a photo editor once those existed and for those people this would have been a deal breaker i could be wrong maybe it wasn't always like this this plastic is pretty yellow maybe it's been degraded over time maybe it used to be grippier i couldn't find any reviews of these things so i don't know how they were received that said i think a lot of inventions you know what i mean probably excel in some specific way that they're very proud of and then fail at capabilities that are established assumptions in the existing market that they're trying to disrupt dragging the edge of a wheel around to capture motion is sufficiently weird that i feel confident i've discovered only one of the failure modes i'm not great at coming up with thorough experiments but it just feels like this mouse probably fails to track in situations that these mice handle just fine i wouldn't be surprised if these mice turned out to have problems with more conventional adversarial surfaces like plastic topped mouse pads or plain old wooden desktops no matter what promises about reliability were being offered to a customer it was going to be tough to sell them this on the strength of edge cases if it couldn't keep up with the mouse they had already that's just plain old common sense don't buy a thing that's worse than the thing you have and that's probably why you've never seen one of these and you've seen millions of these of course i know how this sort of thing works by now there are people watching this who swear by these things and are probably using them right now and hey if it works for you then it's not bad is it i'm not saying it is bad if you like these i'd love to hear about it let me know if i'm wrong about the tracking issues maybe mine is just messed up or maybe i just suck at mousing if you've never had a problem with these i'd be fascinated to hear it and i mean maybe they weren't so bad because 12 years later they were still being produced or maybe they were just being produced again i don't know in 1998 keytronic was selling the lifetime mouse which actually makes this thing look fairly normal i mean yeah it's still got the double disc routine going on but it makes it take back seat in the weirdness parade since it offers the damnedest feature i've ever seen you can show me mice with interchangeable calibration weights mice with 20 buttons on top mice that don't look like mice and i'll stare them down cold but show me a mouse you can convert from two to three button and all blink anyway that's that if you enjoyed this please subscribe so i know you like this sort of thing remember turn on notifications and i'll try to remember to start uploading irregularly like i keep claiming i do if you want to make it harder for me to stop posting regularly then maybe go support me on patreon like these folks are here eventually i may even have to start doing this full time and both of us will suffer for it as always i'm grateful to everyone who's supporting me already and everyone else thanks for watching that's sending me

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude - CRD

Views: 213,539

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics

Id: POSPaiutNlQ

Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021