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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 ;)
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).
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.
How about this, or this, or perhaps, this, or what about this one, or even this old thing.
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There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland