The Optical Super Mice of the 1980's (MSC PC Mouse and Q500 Digital)
Back in the 1980's and the first part of the 1990's, I thought all mice were mechanical until I chanced upon an MSC optical mouse on a Unix workstation. Today all mice are optical, but 40 years ago they were very specialised.
In this video I talk a little bit about the mice of the time, and present three different vintage optical mice from my collection:
MSC Mouse Systems PC Mouse (from cirra 1983)
MSC Mouse Systems PC Mouse 2 (from cirra 1987)
Digital Q500 Mouse (age possibly early 90's)
The latter two work fine with all versions of windows up to Windows 10 (and apparently Windows 11, although I've not tested it). The first mouse uses a propriety protocol and I've not managed to find a modern driver that works with it.
This video contains a few clips of historical content from The Computer Chronicles TV series, reproduced for educational supplement only. It also contains a short recording of myself playing Quake 2 using the Q500 mouse on a Pentium 3 600mhz with two 3DFX Voodoo2 cards running in SLI under Windows 98.
