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The Mice That Didn't Make It
Harry writes "For every blockbuster of the mouse world (such as Microsoft and Logitech's big sellers) there have been countless mice that flopped, or never made it to market. Mice shaped like pyramids; mice shaped like Mickey; mice that doubled as numeric keypads or phones. Even one that sat on your steering wheel. I've rounded up some evocative patent drawings on twenty notable examples."
I'm not reading this article because it's on 20 different pages. STOP THAT SHIT.
Don't forget to add the Novint Falcon!
And it's split across 24 different pages. ... now where are all of the slashdotters who were arguing with me about ad-supported content last night? :)
20 pages for 20 smallish pictures? Really? The site must be desperate for ad revenue.
Don't forget this one. The only manufacturers' mouse which is usually replaced by a 3rd party one within minutes.
.
Trolling is a art,
Guess it didn't count as a mouse...
Too many pages, not so great content. Although some designs, apparently authored by an emulator of Rube Goldberg, are hilarious.
shouldn't it be 'mouses' ?
Does anybody know WTF "Now is the time fob" is supposed to mean on this one?
. . . http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5921266/Blue-MandMs-mend-spinal-injuries.html
. . . poor critter . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Is it just me, or does the mouse on page 4 bear a striking resemblance to Logitech's current line-up of ergonomic mice?
Spread across 24 pages and about as interesting as a dry dog turd. When you submit to slashdot and it gets rejected then some story about loser designs that didn't make it for good reason winds up as front page news it's quite an insult. What's the next article going to be about? Drug addicts that didn't make it to CEO of large tech companies? How about abacus designs that didn't sell? Not inane enough for you? Let's try pocket protector manufacturers that went broke.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's not a mouse, but the :CueCat failed more spectacularly than all of those mice combined.
For every blockbuster of the X world there have been countless X that flopped, or never made it to market.
No. Shit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Fuck that shit in the ass. I refuse to read something in such a shit layout design for maximum ad views while ignoring a user's needs.
Seriously, 24 pages for 20 nice is a flipping joke.
these are some wacky ass design for mice the hand held trackball design, i have a small travel mice for my laptop a few years ago that can go on this list. It is very similar to this hand held trackball but on a small scale and shape like a tiny gun
I purchased a Logitech Trackman Marble FX a number of years ago for about $60. Logitech discontinued it a long time ago. Personally I think it's the best mouse I have ever used. When friends of mine use the computer though they don't like it. It does take getting used to but it's extremely comfortable. Great for first person shooters. Eventually playing Unreal Tournament killed the right mouse button. I went looking for a replacement online and found some on ebay priced at over $300. I guess I'm not the only one that thinks this mouse rocks, but I'm not about to fork over $300 for a mouse. To keep mine alive I took a button out of a $10 mouse and soldered it into the old one. Someday I hope Logitech will bring this design back in a wireless version. As a side note, I think console systems would be improved if the right analog joystick on the controller was replaced with a trackball. Aiming is next to impossible with a joystick.
....is not a mouse at all. It's the RollerMouse, which lets me mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard. I have used this for 10 years and continue to be amazed that its not the standard in computing.
Let's try pocket protector manufacturers that went broke.
We cannot allow such a travesty to occur. They are too big to fail.
Reply to That ||
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
What do you really expect? The light bulb wasn't perfected on the first try either.
Apple Desktop Bus for the win! Hell, I even liked the original ADB mouse. And those old ADB keyboards... I have nostalgia for those like others do for the Model M.
I neglected to see the "Hardware" tag for this article and immediately assumed the article was about freaks of biological science, the mice that were engineered into crazy shapes but that didn't get the positive press that the mouse-with-ear-on-back (http://meredith007.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/mouse-human-ear.jpg) got. You know, rodents shaped like pyramids, steering wheels, trackball rats. Why, I once saw a mouse genetically engineered to have a little phosphorescent red light on its belly that lit up when ever someone dragged it along a flat surface.
The pear-shaped, ridged piece of garbage that came with Packard Bells in the 1990s. I know you're surprised-- Packard-Bell made crappy hardware? But instead of durable grey rubber like most decent mice of the time, the ball on this thing was made of some porous black fake-rubber product that disintegrated in about a month on the display model. It's hard to demo a product when it just came out last month and the customers can see the mouse is already broken.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I took one look at the front page, realized that you created 24 pages to show 20 slides, understood that your main point here was maximizing ad revenue, and closed the tab.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I find myself really wanting one of those number pad mice.
The mouse I got with my 386DX40 was called a Witty Mouse. I think it was rhyming slang though. Sometimes the cursor would move by itself - it was very erratic, but then work normally for a while the next day. Eventually i discovered that the translucent plastic case was a little too transparent - it was my angle-poise lamp shining through the mouse body and affecting the sensor. It worked fine after I painted it ;-)
fnord
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Remember the rules -- no grousing!
Why do articles from Technologizer keep getting posted? They're almsot always awful and spread across 30 pages with 10000 ads per page.
My biggest complaint is where there is a complete lack of a "printer-friendly" option.
Do you also complain when a web site makes printer-friendly versions of its articles available at a low, low price per month?
I've always wanted a mouse with a joystick where the thumb goes for gaming. Why waste 4 keys when your thumb would be plenty? Also would give you analog control for movement. I'm just too lazy to build one myself.
The real mystery is how Logitech iFeel didn't make it. I got that thing right here but it has no support to OS X.
It is immersion powered which can do little vibrates which everyone goes crazy about these days. "Haptic feedback" is the term I guess.
While I was on Windows, it was a real intutive thing which caused no kind of system instability. I would say "because of software", no it is not the case. Unreal (2?) made use of it and it was the only game I could experience real feedback.
Here is its review from 2001
http://www.dansdata.com/ifeel.htm
BTW, hope current Logitech owners don't go mad at me... I just plugged it to my Mac and it works. 8 years :)
Years ago I had a keyboard that had a trackball mouse built into it just below the space bar. It was fantastic because I could put it on my lap and do all the modern computing I needed. In this day and age of mediacenter PCs and the like I'm shocked that there aren't more keyboard/mouse combos out there. Trying to work an optical mouse on the arm of the sofa just isn't natural. Would it really be so hard to tack a trackpad onto a wireless keyboard?
I'm pissed I looked at the pictures.
Uhh, why?
Wait a minute.... Mice that double as phones... It's just so quirky it might work...
You wouldn't believe how many times I've reached for the mouse and gotten a hold of the cell phone instead and wondered why the cursor ain't moving.
The mice that didn't make it -- they're known as lab rats. You know, the 85.4% where the cancer treatment didn't help, or the drugs had no effect...
I seem to remember trying out a mouse like device in the 90's that moved the courser with thought. Whatever happened to those?
The game.
I'm using a mouse right now that I thought would be a piece of junk but actually is quite nice. My Mom (age 82 - I'm NOT living in her basement) went on vacation and visited the chocolate factory in Hershey, PA and brought me back this. It's a standard 2-button mouse with the click/scroll wheel dressed in the Hershey colors of chocolate and silver, but the front half is clear and is filled with some sort of thickish clear liquid. Floating around in that is a miniature Hershey bar, a Kiss, and a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Works as well as any other mouse and is pleasant to look at. Hey, I could use a snack right about now.
Number 12...
Actually is not mine.. is my cat's
I don't know why you linked to that site, and it's better that way. But it has awful trustworthiness/reliability/privacy ratings, and many scam/click-fraud reports.
I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. Nor should anyone.
I think console systems would be improved if the right analog joystick on the controller was replaced with a trackball.
But how big of a trackball? Look at how thin the Wii Classic Controller is. Wouldn't a trackball have to be as small as the trackball in the middle of an Apple Mighty Mouse in order to fit?
I don't have any idea what model it was, but a co-worker used to have a very small HP laptop with a mouse on a little arm that came out the right side of it.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Early 90's.
School got a lot of DEC Stations 3000 to replace a whole bunch of Sun3 boxens.
The mouse was about the same size as a CD, and maybe an inch thick. We called it the "puck".
As all unix mice, it had 3 buttons.
Positioned at 90 degree stride around the edge of the "puck".
I.e. one button to the north of the puck, one button on the east and one button to the west.
Obviously, since the mouse was slightly larger than a hockey puck, it meant that the buttons where spaced about 2 (perhaps 3) inches apart from eachother.
If you take a pile of some 15 CDs then this would be a pretty good approximation of this monstrosity.
For a normal human hand it was basically impossible to leave one finger on each mousebutton for more than a minute before you got severe cramps.
In order to keep a finger on each button, your index finger and your ring finger had to point to 180 degrees different directions.
Try make your index finger and ring finger point in completely opposite directions. You cant? It hurts? It hurts a lot? It sure did. What kind of deranged person would design a mouse like this?
I always saw this as one of the earliest attempts to build hardware for the handicapped. This mouse was designed only for people with severe hand deformities.
I so hated this mouse. I wanted nothing more than grab the cord, swing it around faster and faster and then smash it into the wall.
I hated this mouse with a passion.
Absolutely agree. Just watch people struggling with mice and you wonder how 99.9% of educated, wealthy people don't use trackballs as standard.
...if they had included the annotations. Most of them don't really make sense without knowing what (2) is.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
I'm not going to format this so it's easy to read, I'm tired - so I'm getting straight to the point, I pray there's a billion to once chance a mouse manufacturer is listening.
For high end fingertip gamers (google it) this is the best shaped mouse ever made.
http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~yav/comp/pc/mouse/ltmm3u.jpg
Sadly, no wheel, not optical, old as hell (PS/2!)
All the modern laser or optical mice for gamers are absoloutely and utterly ridiculously huge for fingertip grip gamers, they are far too large or oddly shaped, they are great for browsing, bad for gaming.
I have just purchased this mouse for Warcraft 3 gaming and while it's good - it could do with a thumb button
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&ei=F_17SqSJE4vq6APotOVf&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=razer+salmosa&spell=1&start=0
There always seems to be a fear of putting a lot of buttons on a small mouse, it's unfortunate - we don't all have giant hands.
I remember selling a few of a device that was a hand held mouse/game controller (for the Atari 400/800, VIC29 and C=64). It was more like a joystick without a base, just a handle with buttons on the top. Inside were mercury switches that detected when it was tilted.
Since it had no tactile feedback nor accelerometer type detection for greater tilt, it wasn't long before the user started trying harder and harder to make it go faster (especially for games) by tilting it farther and farther, until they eventually (like 15 minutes eventually) turned it upside down and hosed the mercury switches.
I thought it was a pretty cool idea. My employees thought it was a techno-turd. But we all agreed it was hilarious to load up a fast game, plug this thing in, and let a customer play with it. Within minutes they were twisting their arm like a pretzel and dancing around trying to get body language or position to add to the speed, while cussing the device (but refusing to give up).
It really would have been a good hack except for one thing missing -- something to hold it while you typed. When you went two handed at the keyboard you had to lay it down, thereby positioning your cursor at one edge of the screen as well as ruining the merc switches.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...your "article" over 24 pages? Other submitters go to the trouble of linking a print page to spare us this crap and you link an ad-riddled pos like that on purpose? I don't say that often, but: fuck you.
of mouse is "mouses". Mice are the rodents that chew through your computer cables.
Ah, the classic Mouseman 96. I loved that thing so much back in my Quake days. I used to collect them so I'd always have a spare, I still have one or two of them tucked away amidst my old PC stuff (although it's quite likely they've already been picked over and scavenged for replacement parts over the years). You could practically forget it was under your hand, it was perfectly shaped and effortless to move.
They did make a USB version called the Wingman but I never tried it; you can still find PS/2 ports on a surprising number of PCs.
ZOMG! Let the paranoia spread on /.
... but my favorite mouse ever was just a branded plain-ol' two button, roller-ball mouse. Branded with the underrated 90's Nickelodeon cartoon character Cat-Dog. A Cat-Dog Mouse.
Came to bitch about formatting and ads. Sent them some feedback in "Contact Us" to let them know they failed.
"...if you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed..." -Homer
I've done a bit of B2B work, and eventually, most of my really successful clients start looking into technology investments, and like all tech-related business, they bring me in. I would say that out of the last 100 products I've reviewed for clients, 98 of which required having my lawyer parse through lengthy NDAs, 95 were "input devices", 90 were "mouse replacement" input devices, and 75 have failed- 20 are waiting to fail, 4 are **LONG** shots, and 1 has actually turned a profit. I'm just glad I recommended against everything but the profitable one, with the exception of one extremely qualified recommendation on one of the long shots- (i.e. you have a 2% chance of getting your money back, but if you make it through that lottery, it'll be 200 times what you put in)
Mice are like a gallon jug of milk. Everybody's got one, but they rarely stray from what they are used to when shopping, unless you can really blow somebody out of the water.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
When I was shopping for the mouse I have now, I was in London Drugs and actually SAW the phone/mouse combo! It plugs into the usb port and comes with software so you can use it as a soft-phone.
:p
Doubt they sold many though
A mouse that did not make this story and was the very best mouse of all before there were optical ones was called The HP Wheel Mouse. This mouse from I believe 1990 had two nylon wheels, on its underside, mounted at a 45 degree angle,which where spring loaded, and each touched the pad or table at 90 degrees from the other. The HP wheel mouse was only available in RS-232, and it worked on anything, even upside down, and never got clogged up. Inside it used an optical encoder wheel... I was told that HP sold the patent, when I tried to buy more of them, and the best mouse that you never had to clean, which worked upside down and without a mouse pad disappeared,
I'd prefer to die speaking my mind that live fearing to speake The Internet is the liberty tree