Defeating Mouse Lint

Today in Tedium: Here’s something that you, as a computer user, likely have not had to do in a long time: Open up the mouse, and clean out the grime that had built up on the rollers over the last couple of months, revealing that no, your desk is not as clean as you believe it to be. No, it’s not because your desk got cleaner. Rather, it’s because we figured out that optical mice were significantly better designs, because they could work in many more settings, in fact, without even requiring a mouse pad. So, what was the aha moment where the ball mouse lost out to the optical one? And how did it happen? Today’s Tedium ponders a mouse-design murder. — Ernie @ Tedium

When it comes to mice, the fewer moving parts, the better. (Dan Foy/Flickr)

The mechanical mouse’s frustrating side effect that affected its long-term fortunes

Like the dial-up modem, the mechanical mouse is an excellent example of a device so utterly defeated by the technology that supplanted it that it basically disappeared from the market.

The defeat was so complete that three years ago, a user in the Reddit group r/Trackballs asked for help finding a “BOTTOM trackball.” which led to a lot of snickers in the comments.

The trackball was first, and it turns out, as ball-based input devices go, the trackball won.

Laugh as much as you want about that, but I dare you to search on Amazon for a new mechanical mouse with a built-in ball. You will struggle to find one that isn’t a trackball. "Ball mouse" brings up dozens of examples of trackballs, while “mechanical mouse” brings up mice with mechanical switches (you know, like the keyboards). In fact, the only thing that I might even describe as being in a similar category to a traditional ball mouse sold on Amazon today is a device called the Contour Design Roller Mouse Pro, which essentially uses a giant roller that can be controlled by hand.

This weird-looking mouse, called the Contour Design Roller Mouse Pro, is an excellent deconstruction of what mechanical mice actually do—move around rollers.

Ball mice, if you’re not familiar, used rollers in a way not dissimilar to this unusual beast of navigation. The average one used three, and in their day, they were fairly inexpensive. Most of the major mice you would get from computer manufacturers, including Apple and Commodore, were ball-based mice until the early 2000s, in which a sea change happened.

We’ll get to what caused the sea change in a second. But let’s talk about how we got to that point.

It’s wild that Xerox was already making optical mice years before MacOS or Windows were even a glimmer. (via Dick Lyon’s personal website)

Xerox had the optical mouse ready to go before you ever tried a ball mouse

As you may know, Xerox initially shaped the graphical user interface, but was unprepared to exploit those innovations themselves. One of those innovations was the optical mouse, which one of its engineers, Richard F. Lyon, developed in the early 1980s.

Lyon, thankfully for us, has left some impressive notes about what he built and how it improved the mousing experience. It was actually Xerox’s second innovation on the mouse front. Originally, the mouse used a pair of wheels to navigate X and Y motion in a herky-jerky fashion, but gradually shifted to ball bearings.

In his article about the mouse, he noted that even with this added mechanism, the ball-bearing approach to mousing left something to be desired.

In Xerox research, the mouse has been in popular use for over eight years, and has been found to be preferable to other pointing devices. However, it has not been outstandingly reliable; the balls or wheels can get dirty and slip on the pad, rather than rolling, or the commutators can get dirty and skip. This is likely to be a significant problem in maintaining workstations that use the mouse in an uncontrolled environment.

In other words, your early frustrations with mousing were well known at the start of the ’80s, when Lyon was attempting to improve the design.

The weaknesses of the wheel mouse and the ball-bearing mouse had a single root cause: They are mechanical devices, and mechanical devices are bound to break down. That makes them more expensive to produce, harder to repair, and more likely to run into damage that prevents you from using the machine.

You know something that is less likely to randomly break, however? The light emitting diode, arguably the most important innovation of the 1970s, with companies like RCA, General Electric, Fairchild, and Texas Instruments producing them by the truckload. That meant there was a financial incentive to figure out a way to build a mouse that could be controlled optically.

As Lyon put it: “Another disadvantage of the electro-mechanical mouse is that it's expensive; the one-chip optical mouse is cheap.”

The price of a weighted rubber ball and rollers could not compete with a cheap piece of silicon and a light source.

There was one problem. It required a dedicated mouse pad, not unlike the mouse pad ball mice use, except it was highly detailed and intended to be used by the mouse to help keep its position in mind. The optical mouse was not built to track the cursor’s movement on any surface, something ball mice could technically do (not that you would want to). It wasn’t particularly attractive, but it was cheap, with Lyon noting “it can be printed for about a penny on an ordinary ink press.”

Got $2,750 lying around? Good news. You can buy this mouse on eBay.

Ultimately, then, when the Xerox Star hit the market at the insanely high price of $16,000 and obviously failed to set the world ablaze, the optical mouse—which as Lyon noted, was cheaper to manufacture and held the benefit of not requiring constant cleaning—fell by the wayside.

Someone else would carry its baton to the general consumer market—and that person, oddly enough, developed his variant around the time as Lyon. He didn’t have the backing of Xerox.

Arguably the most important mouse ever made. (nez/Flickr)

The company that would fix the mouse and save millions of people from a life of roller-cleaning

So, we know ball mice were frustrating to maintain. But when it came to optical mice, did the mouse pads have to be so fundamental to their function?

For years, the answer to that question was, unfortunately, yes. But in the fall of 1999, a new mouse emerged on the market with the backing of a major player in input devices: Microsoft.

During the 1990s, as the company crushed its competition, it had developed a parallel reputation of designing keyboards, mice, and controllers that were significantly better than they had any right to be. The Microsoft Sidewinder controllers, for example, were surprisingly good, even if Microsoft forgot most of the lessons from that device when it developed the original Xbox controllers. As someone who grew up with a Natural Keyboard, I have strong memories of that weird, bulgy keyboard.

And the mice were no exception. Microsoft added a curve to the mouse to better contour the device to your hand, and infused numerous innovations into the mouse throughout the 1990s through its IntelliMouse line. The introduction of the scroll wheel was particularly inspired. And because Microsoft controlled the software stack, it basically meant the scroll wheel was properly supported right away.

But the real game-changer came in 1999, when it introduced the IntelliMouse Explorer, which was both the first USB mouse Microsoft made and the first optical mouse produced using a new groundbreaking technology developed by recent Hewlett Packard spinoff Agilent Technologies, which was essentially the company’s R&D arm.

Agilent, still around today, presents itself as a diagnostic testing design firm focused on medical devices. But it made a lot of money off of optical mice sensors. And fittingly, too, as HP was deeply involved in the R&D process that led to the modern LED way back in the 1960s. Essentially, we got a better optical mouse because the research arm that developed a commercially viable LED, decades later, decided to take a deeper look at the issue and come up with some solutions to managing it that could theoretically get rid of the need for an additional surface.

The company’s employees came up with numerous patents during the era that together solved the problem. The most important of which, “Method and device for tracking relative movement by correlating signals from an array of photoelements,” described its goal as such:

While the Ertel et al. cross-correlation process operates well for its intended purpose, its application to determining movement within a two-dimensional scheme requires sequential maximization of two or three cross-correlation functions, each having two or three variables with respect to which maximization is performed. The patent itself notes that the computational complexity of the two-dimensional extension is daunting, compared to the computational complexity of the one-dimensional approach.

What is needed is a method and device for tracking relative movement of the device relative to a region of interest, while accommodating curvilinear relative movement without a high degree of computational complexity.

Essentially, the optical mouse, if it was going to get rid of the specialized mouse pad, not only had to figure out where it was in context to the screen, but also in context to itself.

Hand-held scanners. Remember those? (via Wikimedia Commons)

If you’ve ever used a hand-held scanner like a Logitech Scanman, the type popular before flatbed scanners became widespread, the concept is actually somewhat similar. You move your hand to scan the photo or document on your desk, and it pulls in whatever is under your cursor, stitching together that information into an image on the screen. If you randomly lift the scanner halfway through the process and put it somewhere else on the page, the result looks jumbled.

The difference is that optical mice use that data to purely understand its position in the context of the cursor on the screen, meaning that, because accuracy in scanning isn’t the goal, it can scan the surface of your desk much faster. Optical mice users frequently “lift the scanner halfway through the process.” By solving for that—making it so that the mouse could reset its context on a dime—they suddenly had a mouse that could be used anywhere on your desk while still knowing where it was on the screen.

The IntelliMouse, the fruit of this research, was groundbreaking, and within just a few years, every major manufacturer had licensed the tech from Agilent.

It has shaped the numerous mice that have come in the years since—while leaving the ball mouse in the dust.