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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 ;)
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?
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.
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?
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.