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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...
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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?"
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
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).
I remember the stories of Pentagon staffers getting RSI from Missile Command machines in arcades near the building.
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?
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.
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
I prefer the touchpad to a trackball. I find it much more responsive, and resistant to gunk. Of course, a touchpad is virtually impossible for FPSs, but that's what my USB ports are for.
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 agree. I love my Kensington Turbo Mouse(s) I bought my first when when i got my performa 6220 and it still works to this day. They of course now have usb versions available, one of which is attached to my G4 tower. The software for them is also excellent, altho the OSX version is lacking in features still compared to its OS9 counterpart. They may seem a bit pricey for a pointing device, but it should last you a long time. My original one has lasted for 4 or 5 years now.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
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.
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.)
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Well, yes my brother NRCer, I did mess that up a bit. Thanks for the correction.
For the record, the preview wasn't working at the time I posted.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
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"
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