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Trackball 50 Years Old
GRW writes "Rachel Ross in a Toronto Star story called The mouse that soared, writes "Fifty years ago, a team of engineers in Toronto turned a simple bowling ball into one of the most influential gadgets of our time. The trackball they created would grow into a mouse." "Tom Cranston and a colleague, Fred Longstaff, thought up the trackball idea while working on a Lake Ontario military project called the Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving System (DATAR)."" I played a bowling game in Boston once that used a bowling ball sized trackball to run a ball through a bizarre 3D bowling lane. I thought a regular trackball messed with my wrists ;)
It would be cool if they still made trackballs with 16-lbs bowling balls... a couple of my cow-workers are perfectly lined up right now...
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
Reminds me of my favorite arcade game. Trackballs were really the only game controllers that you could seriously bang on, vent your frustration with, and not feel like you were damaging the controller or yourself. You could spin that bad boy like nobody's business. Joysticks fought back, but trackballs went with the flow.
What's your damage, Heather?
The carpal-tunnel in my wrist thanks you.
I hope someone cleans that thing up soon.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I much prefered Marble Madness. Really cool tune and that isometric view made it feel really cutting edge.
I think that all trackball mice are the best and everyone should be using them. They are more comfortable and are less stress on the hands, so remember trackball's are the way to go.
IMHO, still the best input device going... Especially, now that they have been upgraded to optical. Plus, you can play Crystal Castles the way it was meant to be played...
Do a google search before posting.
As much as I loath trackballs, I must say that this is refreshing. After all the shouting matchings and near fists fights over the supremacy of the trackball over the mouse and vice versa, this is the sorta thing that makes me think world peace is possible. I think I'll show this to those trackball heathens I call friends and we can all enjoy a good cry and sing "Why Can't We be Friends?".
Caffeine Good
It sure is hard to use a trackball with this new optical stuff. Where is the ball, now it's all red and glowing? And back in the old days, it was enough to turn the mouse upside down.
[...] turned a simple bowling ball into one of the most influential gadgets of our time [...] The British and American navies seemed impressed, but not enough to buy into the project.
:)
Can you blame them? How can you roll the darn thing?
Although having a cord attached to your boling-ball can have certain advantages.
I adore my Logitech trackman FX. I've had it for years, Takes next to no desk space, and I don't have to pick it up when I need to turn farther in quake III, just wing the ball and let inertia do the rest while I pound the fire button... DeathSpirl!!! Mwhahahahahahaha :)
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
The "bizzare bowling game in Boston" was HyperBowl. That was the $30,000 version, but there is also a home version for only $20 (bowling-ball-sized-trackball not included).
A windows version is available, but it doesn't include a trackball. For that, you need to buy the attraction version. (It's only US$29,995.00.)
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
Wow, when I read the article headline, I thought the post was talking about the Trackball game. You know, the one with the plastic scoop things where you throw the ball to each other. I think there was a yellow ball and a white ball. Anyone else remember that? You could put mad spin on the ball and unsuspecting people in the head with it.
What an incredible game... I wonder when the 50th anniversary of that game will be.
I remember the stories of Pentagon staffers getting RSI from Missile Command machines in arcades near the building.
if they still made trackballs with 16-lbs bowling balls
Still? How about EVER?
If you read the article, you'd notice that they used a 5-pin bowling ball.
Thought your 5 year old laptop (you know, the kind that used to have a good trackball in it, not that eraserhead or touchpad crap) was heavy? Try it with a bowling ball instead of a 5 cm sphere!
My other sig is funny!
What is much more interesting about this article than the blow by blow history of the track ball is how much it says about the Canadian psyche.
They have a real complex about trying to be as good as their neighbor to the south. I've heard a few Canadians that live in the U.S. complain about it and well, this article really shows it.
"The British and American navies seemed impressed, but not enough to buy into the project. So it was shelved."
And better yet,
"It was a truly Canadian choice. Had they been building the device in the United States, bowling balls wouldn't have been an option"
There are a lot of nice things about Canada and I've never understood this obsession w/trying to keep up w/the U.S.
It made this article a lot more interesting though.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I love trackballs, haven't found a good one thats USB compatible. Any suggestions? Preferably Mac. I have always liked trackballs, they feel so much more real.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
At one time my manager was an old mechanical engineer named Roy. Roy had been a fighter pilot, then an engineer at several defense contractors. Roy's account of the creation of the trackball is similar to this story, but he did not mention Canada. I always assumed it took place in the US.
Anyway, Roy told me that an electrical engineer came up with the idea. The problem was to find an input device that would enable an operator to rapidly point at a blip on the radar screen and 'aquire' it as a target. The EE implementation of the idea did not work very well, however, because if the operator shoved the ball in the direction of the target, the cursor would follow an elliptical or parabolic path (can't remember which). Roy invented the mechanical ball suspension that enables the ball to spin in a straight line. This enabled a very fast and ergonomic mode of operation - the operator would push the ball towards the target with a force proportional to the distance, then 'catch' the ball with the outstretched fingers to decelerate it onto the target.
Apparently, the tendency of the trackball to follow a curved path is a variant of a problem well known to mechanical engineers. Therefore Roy's invention was simply the application of a well known mechanical engineering technique. Maybe the people cited in this article are the EE's who originated the idea.
Has anyone seen any new laptop computers with track balls? I remember having an old ATT brand laptop (there was such a thing) with one. It was terrible. It would always get dirt in it and the ball would seem to skip at times. New laptop pointing devices are better, but I still think they need improvement. I think touch screens are probably the best solution.
What do people here prefer? Track point (eraser thingy in keyboard) or touch pads on laptops?
In John Vardalas' book "The Computer Revolution in Canada" (MIT Press, 2001) we learn about DATAR, an attempt by the Canadian Navy to find and exploit a high-tech niche to trade to the British and US navies for prestige and other technologies. After their success hunting U-boats and protecting conveys across the Atlantic in WWII, DATAR was concieved to be a real-time decentralized system to track targets and transmit information between allied ships. It was much more advanced than the centralized UK proposal, but they had a hard time selling it to either the UK/US. Eventually, the US decided to build their own, with a crash-program and millions on dollars that the Canadians couldn't keep up with.
But it wasn't just a mouse that came out of it:
Eventually, the real-time experience from DATAR begat the worlds first electronic digital postal sorting computer (a prototype built for Canada Post years before anything similar); the first check sorting computer for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York; the first real-time airline reservation system (beating SABRE by a few months with a much simpler, cheaper, and faster system); and the Ferranti FP6000 (eventually the British ICT1900 series).
It's a great story and a great book. Not much has been written about the history of computing in Canada, but Vardalas is the best here.
Engelbart's early word processor had some features that haven't yet caught on. Using the NLS system, a simple text file could be presented in many different ways. The user could move quickly through a long document by viewing just the first sentence of each paragraph, or the first word of every sentence.
Now this is the sort of creative thinking Linux aps need to sink the MSS Office. To think these ideas are decades old.
The Gardener
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I love my trackball! Got it at staples, the biggest trackball that anyone makes anymore. And anyways, the mouse is significantly worse for your wrists. Almost correspondes with my DVORAK useage.
The game is called hyperbowl (http://www.hyperbowl.com) and the only place you can play that in Boston is at Jillians (http://www.jilliansboston.com/). Jillians is huge! The cocktail waitresses are so freakin hot, the BU-UMASS-Northeastern-Harvard-MIT chicks are so freaky freakin hot. And after you break the ice with a video game, you take the party upstairs play some pool, get hammered, and then go down to the basement and dance at Atlas.
I work right across the street at the public art high school and don't get me started on young hotties, cause I could go on all day.
G
I dunno what kind of mice they have in Canada today, but all of my mice have three buttons, with the exception of the Microsoft mouse which I use as a backup for my laptop. My first serial mouse had 3 buttons, as did other old mice I've come across.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The main control for it is a trackball that you really have to crank to get power into your golf swing. its a bit larger than a baseball... It controls slice and everything on the back swing. Addictive bar game. I mention it since the bowling video game was mentioned.
It's about the size of a softball and, as I understand it, approx. 3.5 pounds.
In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated the mouse with the rest of the NLS system to a group of computer scientists and engineers. It was a landmark in computer history for a number of reasons, outside of the mouse. Designed as a machine that assisted the user throughout the working day, NLS was the first system that linked ideas together in "hyperlinks," much like the Internet we enjoy today.
Ermmm.... who is it that's tried to patent hyperlinks?
I think this is evidence of "prior art."
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I played a bowling game in Boston once that used a bowling ball sized trackball to run a ball through a bizarre 3D bowling lane.
The Metreon in San Francisco has an Arcade hall that has this game. You basically control how a bowling ball rolls through the streets of San Francisco, trying to miss cable-cars etc.
The oldest wheel found in archeological excavations was discovered in what was Mesopotamia and is believed to be over fifty-five hundred years old. This previous invention is regarded as having greatly influenced the inventors of the trackball made 50 years ago.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
why the fuck was that moderated as troll?
It is much easier to play fps games with an optical mouse.
The track ball 50 years old and the times are changing with the intoduction of Optical technology. The better responce and not having to clean make this kind of mouse the best friend of a lazy man (less movment of the hand and no cleaning). Not saying I am not a fan of track ball. I like to make things harder by playing UT, with a 2 button mouse, online and still doing rather well. --FS
--FS
Long before I'd ever heard of a mouse I was familar with trackballs. I'm a radar maintainer and, as the article mentions, trackballs were, and are, used in radar applications. However, in the radar world, the mouse is slowly achieving ascendancy over the trackball. Old habits die hard, though, and many trackballs are still hanging round (because they're attached to older radar systems that were desinged for use with the trackball). Newer systems are designed for mouse use, but a part of that is coincidental: newer systems are also based on Sun workstations and Solaris, and use the peripherals supplied with Sparcs/Ultras.
/. eventually, detailing the rise of Unix in the Radar environment (at least in my corner of the radar environment, Air Traffic Control). Many geeks here might be surprised to learn that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration, the US agency that is responsible for our nation's Air Traffic infrastructure, for you international readers) has a variety of equipment based on Sun Hardware. Although such systems are in the minority, the trend for newer systems is definitely towards Unix. Furthermore, in anticipation of a large influx of Unix-based equipment, many (most?) FAA technicians are required to complete both a 3 week resident Unix course (using Redhat 7.x on a PC) and a 3 week resident networking course, covering TCP/IP, Ethernet, etc.
I hope to submit a piece to
Of course, the initial reaction by many of you might be "OMG, only 3 weeks each? What can they possibly learn?" I won't go into too much detail (save that for the piece) but they learn enough to be Operators/Maintenares, and to follow plainly written procedures with some idea of what's going on behind the scenes. In most cases, Sparc/Ultra failure will prompt replacement, and the new box will have the OE, neccesary Patches, and Application software preloaded: only site customization will have to be installed, and I expect that that will be done by scripting (to make it as simple and fool-proof as possible for the Maintainer). Much more to write, but that will have to wait.
BTW, getting back to trackballs: never have liked the damn things, glad to see the mouse is finally coming on strong.
with trackballs was back in the '60s. They were used on the consoles of the SAGE/BUIC systems which the US and Canadian military manned. These were computer systems hooked up to the DEW (Distant Early Warning) radars in N. Canada and Alaska installed to detect bombers coming into North America. SAGE was the Strategic Air/Ground Environment system which was later augmented by BUIC, the Back Up Intercepter Control system.
The track ball was somewhat smaller than a bowling ball. More like a baseball in size and was used to select blips on radar screens.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
It would help if you could check your own posting as well.
Cheers,
Member of the DNRC
2) Crystal Castles
3) Missile Command
4) That black & white Atari Football game
I have an ADB and a USB Kensington Orbit. If only I could figure out how to get MacMAME to use them properly in these games. (I'd also like to get proper analog control working in Spy Hunter and Arkanoid.)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
A mouse is better for text editing, etc.
To get the idea, thing of something in the tabletop about the size of a mouse pad. At the top of the mouse pad are your buttons, right under your fingertips. The track ball sits under you hand in the cup of the palm. The curvature of the ball matches your palm nicely, basically a bowling ball on rollers. You spin it, and it has great momentum. good stuff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Actually, they're better now (or maybe I'm less bitter) than they were a few years ago, but I find I always end up hitting the pad with thumb, and especially when using a WM with windows set to focus on rollover, this gets pretty annoying.
However, when I was in a large computer store last week (Fry's in Austin), I ran into a guy looking at laptops at the same time I was -- an ex computer repairman. We talked about why so few laptops come with the (IMO vastly, incomprehensibly better) trackpoint / erasor / nipple thing, and he said that it's because a) they fail a lot (something I can vouch for too) and b) to replace them means replacing the whole keyboard subassembly, rather than just the pointer device, as with a trackpad.
Now that trackballs are optical, I hope some brave company at least makes one optional. I rather liked it on my Powerbook 140.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm more interested about the numbered-cross refrenced microfiche. Could this be prior art for hyperlinking? Isn't there a lawsuit going on right now about this stuff? Anyone?
The trackball is 50 years old? The article explains that nobody really cared for the huge Canadian bowling ball invention and that the project was abandoned.
The article leaves us in the dark as to what influence this invention had on current trackballs. The reader must guess. Was the trackball reinvented later on using something smaller than a bowling ball? Was the modern trackball simply miniaturized? Is the current trackball, like the article says, simply a mouse turned over? Take your pick at a guess!
The statement that this particular track ball grew into a mouse is contradicted even by the article itself. As it explains, the mouse was a completely separate invention, not a modification of the trackball. The story can not even say with certainty whether or not the trackball was considered as a solution before Engelbart invented the mouse.
This article appears to be nothing more than a Canadian's attempt to project an illusion of superiority over Americans.
for years my dad had told me that his cousin (tom cranston) had helped invent the mouse and i never really believed him. until now!
It would probably have taken more memory than the machine (Burroughs B3700) had to cope with the trackball.
Makes you wonder...
One criticism I have of the trackballs I've used over the years is this: I'd really like a LARGE ball to use for more precise movement. It would have to be fairly lightweight, though. A bowling-ball-sized sphere is what I'd like, but certainly not one weighing several kilos.
A trackball that large would probably necessitate a pretty robust wrist/upper arm rest, too. It's hard to imagine some ergonomic hand-only platform like a Logitech combined with a really big sphere.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
hawk, who wouldn't dairy to act in such a manner