Slashdot Mirror
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
The carpal-tunnel in my wrist thanks you.
I hope someone cleans that thing up soon.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
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
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).
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.
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.
Indeed. And maybe one of these years you'll win the hockey olympic gold medal. Sorry we had to beat you again.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.