When Doug Englebart was doing his initial Augment/NLS research, he tried a lot of different pointing devices before he came to the mouse. He tried head tracking, foot pedals, even some sort of device that attached to your knee. All of these proved awkward, so eventually he came up with the simple mouse. Apparently, the original mouse was a a little square box with a big red button on top, and the cable coming out the back quickly earned it the nickname "mouse".
I agree. I have a Apple IIGS from 1985 or 6 that has an origianl mouse an keyboard that work flawlessy. By comparison, the piece of shit I'm typing on now has several partially broken keys already and its about two years old. The Sun stuff I use every day sucks it too. The old keyboards are ok, but the new ones are terrible. The old mice are shite. The new ones (rounder and thinner, all one color instead of purple buttons) are worse shite. But mouse replacement every 6 months? I've never had that rate of destruction. That's scary. You know, you only need to lightly use one finger on the buttons right? No jackhammers or anything.
There's been posts about how there should have been a huge stereo and what not. On saturday night, they actually had a live band down there playing the tetris music for a couple of hours. It was pretty rad. Also, there's been some other stuff on the wall for the last week or so. The scili is right near the door of the computer lab. One night, a friend and I walked out of the lab at like 3am to be greeted by a 14-story pixelated smily face. Kind of disquieting. They also had the game of life on it for a while I think.
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When Doug Englebart was doing his initial Augment/NLS research, he tried a lot of different pointing devices before he came to the mouse. He tried head tracking, foot pedals, even some sort of device that attached to your knee. All of these proved awkward, so eventually he came up with the simple mouse. Apparently, the original mouse was a a little square box with a big red button on top, and the cable coming out the back quickly earned it the nickname "mouse".
I agree. I have a Apple IIGS from 1985 or 6 that has an origianl mouse an keyboard that work flawlessy. By comparison, the piece of shit I'm typing on now has several partially broken keys already and its about two years old. The Sun stuff I use every day sucks it too. The old keyboards are ok, but the new ones are terrible. The old mice are shite. The new ones (rounder and thinner, all one color instead of purple buttons) are worse shite. But mouse replacement every 6 months? I've never had that rate of destruction. That's scary. You know, you only need to lightly use one finger on the buttons right? No jackhammers or anything.
I for one, recommend adoption of the Westron, or Common Speech, on the internet. j
Re: music, they did better: They had a band sit on the patio in front of that wall of the scili and play the tetris music (at least on saturday)
There's been posts about how there should have been a huge stereo and what not. On saturday night, they actually had a live band down there playing the tetris music for a couple of hours. It was pretty rad. Also, there's been some other stuff on the wall for the last week or so. The scili is right near the door of the computer lab. One night, a friend and I walked out of the lab at like 3am to be greeted by a 14-story pixelated smily face. Kind of disquieting. They also had the game of life on it for a while I think.