Jack Hawley's Unstoppable Computer Mouse

Looks like Jack was a connoisseur of 1980's porn & cocaine.
The man needed a mouse that could endure Joy Gel Oil !

Legend says that he is still cleaning up glitter to this day...

A comparison of this mouse vs optical mouse on dirty, oily or liquid stained surfaces would have been fun. As for the "maybe I'm mousing wrong"... that's not a trait you should have to learn. It should come naturally once you understand that it moves the frickin' cursor. On the one hand I'm afraid that this turning wheel motion was always present.

On the other hand: look at that old mouse go! My old Microsoft mice have all deteriorated into rubber mush by now (I kept one as spare, but it had become too disgusting to pick up and my normal cleaning methods failed on it).

My computer mouse also works on anything. Even suspended in mid air! I love my kensinton orbit

Must have been up to at least 2005 that we used ball mice at the office where all hardware was pretty up to date.

Hawley Mouse, Batman!

Kensington Expert Mouse trackball user since 1990 at JPL ... I still have my original PS2 MK1 white version before they went optical and it's still more comfortable to use than any new mouse I know of ... these are what built NASA

So glad I don't have to clean my balls anymore.

Thank you for making this video to show what is inside them!!
I saw 1 in Retro PC Gamers group on FB & tried to ask people what was inside but no1 was being any help. 🤷

I remember when those Honeywell mice came out. They were very expensive.

dude.] just put a ball under those wheels and you got a ball mouse

I had this mouse.... for YEARS. It outlasted 3 computers. Absolutely the best mouse I've ever had.

long gone are the days of cleaning other peoples balls in the school computer room because nobody elese understood why you needed too

My library had these back in the day. I assumed it was so that jerks couldn't steal the ball out of the mice, rendering them inoperable.

I don't think there was a reset on that original mouse with the potentiometers. Rather, the mouse has an X and Y value minimums and maximums that corresponded to the movement area on the screen. Effectively think of the mouse as the point on an Etch-a-Sketch screen.

First vid I've seen that shows cleaning the rollers! Ah, memories.

CRD unfairly profiled Jack Hawley as a huckster just because he looks like hes about to tie a woman to railroad tracks

My first task working with computers in the late 90s was cleaning ball mice. Hundreds and hundreds of ball mice. I can appreciate the "screw it I'll make something better" mentality that would lead to this

He is a version of me, but more productive. I lik Holly.

As a seasoned CNC operator in the Oily Glitter factory, you have found me my perfect mouse. Thank you, Ray Dude! Now, to go cry myself to sleep in sheets forever oily and glittery.

Okay you said that you'd have to pick up the mouse and move it back over but that honestly sounds like you're just moving the problem somewhere else. Provided that rotational end point is greater than the distance traveled to cross the whole computer screen it will almost never be an issue unless you, as you said, lift it up and move it over.

cathode ray dude
sometimes i see usernames that make me jealous for not coming up with it first

I inherited a holly mouse with an old windows PC I got for teaching a guy how to play his guitar. He threw it together from junkyard stuff and just threw in one of these with it. I had forgotten about the experience entirely, because the mouse just worked like a mouse. It may still be somewhere in a storage unit, but I imagine I have long since thrown it away.

I wonder if there was a contract to use a mouse in space. this thing would work in space but then I think they just sent a trackball anyway

maybe 3 of the rollers angled 60 degree apart would fix the issue of sensitivity

Last ball mouse I owned:
Razer Boomslang..

It's likely that, with that original mouse, you wouldn't need to pick it up and reset it.

Instead, if one extreme of the "vertical" wheel corresponded to the top of the screen—while the other extreme corresponded to the bottom—when you ran out of potentiometer travel, there wouldn't be any further to go anyway.

Funnily enough inside a ball mouse there are two rollers as on Engelbart’s design.

Used the "hockey puck" version of that mechanism back at NASA in the early '90s on DECstations (or maybe VAXstations). Odd ergonomics because of the hockey puck shape, but the mechanism required a lot less maintenance than the roller ball type mice that we had on the X-terminals.

Did the optical mouse come out first or the optical trackball? I remember how different it was when Logitech came out with their "Marble" trackball. I have one of those that has probably lasted me for over 25 years.

Great video, straight to the point without any useless fillerswhile providing some history and enough context :) . thanks

Your an awesome presenter.

I was lucky enough to have one of those, used it for many years and only upgraded when good optical mice became available.
It was plenty reliable enough for fps shootters.
Soo nice not having to keep cleaning it like ball mice.

My high school glued all the access panels to the balls in the rodents in the computer labs because dick head teenagers used to steal the mouse balls from the mouse.

Since they spent money fitting out a computer lab with Acorn computers, they could have spent the money on these rodents instead.

Remember Acorn computers? No, I didn't think so

jack hawley? more like... joe hawley

hah, graceful jabberwocky

I must be a weirdo...I actually enjoyed cleaning out my ball mice.

The degradation of performance was so gradual that by the time you noticed, there was enough lint to clean out easily.

And once you did clean it out, my God, the sudden improvement was miraculous! It was like having your congested nose and ears suddenly and simultaneously clear and being able to breathe and hear normally again!

Bliss! ❤

X063X? I guess that guy got balls, because his mice didn't have any? Also it brought back memories wiring up "paddle's" to the joyport of a bread basket. Seriously, that guy must have had some trial and error with log/lin potentiometers, noise and possible centering too. That's on the fly engineering.

i had one of these it came with my $2 gold coin donation old uni computer giveaway that i picked up as my first PC. I eventually threw it away into the trashcan when that computer died and I bought a new one and it didn't have a serial port

Not only do a spring and bearing cost more, they can both wear out fairly easily, lowering the lifespan of the device, and magnets (almost) never spontaneously stop working, so the failure points are going to be elsewhere in the device, like the cable.

This video has made me realize that a machine I helped build for tracking backdrops on a stage for a projector could probably have been constructed in a much simpler way... aaaugh...

i think this is better than laser mouse

perfection, bring it back

I appreciate you stating that you're initial presumption of the mouse was wrong. Awesome vid.

I need one!

It would be cool to have one with clear plastic so you can see the mechanism

someone is gonna recreate the mouse and use it to play COD