00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I think I bought old guy shoes by accident.
00:03SPEAKER- Again?
00:04SPEAKER- What do you mean again?
00:06SPEAKER- Look, man, I have bad news about your old guy status.
00:09SPEAKER- Look, I wore cool, I wore sambas for a long time,
00:13SPEAKERthen I switched to Stan Smith's, yeah.
00:15SPEAKER- You wore open source file sharing on your feet?
00:17SPEAKER- Well, I mean, kind of, yeah,
00:18SPEAKERbut also like indoor soccer shoes,
00:20SPEAKERI guess technically is what they are.
00:21SPEAKER- Oh, those are, wow, I've never, oh, oh, oh,
00:24SPEAKERit's a, that is an Adidas type of shoe.
00:27SPEAKERIt's a specific W-toe, not the Clyde with the round toe,
00:33SPEAKERbut the W-toe front with the five stripes
00:36SPEAKERand usually white is this,
00:38SPEAKERI've been doing Stan Smith's for the last little bit.
00:40SPEAKER- Yeah, those are classic.
00:42SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a good shoe.
00:43SPEAKER- Yeah, okay.
00:45SPEAKERThose are not your old guy shoes to be clear?
00:46SPEAKER- No, no, so I, look, I've started doing a thing
00:50SPEAKERwhere I have a pair of shoes
00:51SPEAKERthat I just wear around the house
00:52SPEAKERthat I don't really wear outside
00:54SPEAKERbecause I can't walk around barefoot
00:55SPEAKER'cause my feet hurt if I do that.
00:56SPEAKER- Okay, I was gonna say,
00:57SPEAKERthat's the only way it's acceptable
00:59SPEAKERto wear shoes in the house at this point,
01:00SPEAKERat least around here.
01:01SPEAKER- Well, we had a dog for a long time,
01:03SPEAKERso the dog poops in the yard and then walks in,
01:05SPEAKERwe don't wash your feet.
01:06SPEAKERSo I assume like I'm not worried
01:08SPEAKERabout cleanliness of the floors.
01:09SPEAKER- Fair.
01:10SPEAKER- However, like during the pandemic,
01:12SPEAKERwhen I didn't leave the house at all for a long time,
01:14SPEAKERI bought a pair of these cloud foam shoes
01:15SPEAKER'cause they popped up on Amazon one day
01:17SPEAKERand they were like 30 bucks.
01:18SPEAKERI was like, these look awesome.
01:20SPEAKERThey were slip-on Adidas.
01:22SPEAKERLike they had like little elastic things over the arch.
01:24SPEAKERThey kind of held in place and didn't flop around
01:26SPEAKERlike a sandal or something or a clog and they were great.
01:30SPEAKERAnd then I wore them out and they don't make those anymore
01:32SPEAKER'cause they update them every year.
01:33SPEAKERSo I bought, I didn't buy this year's version
01:35SPEAKER'cause those were like 90 bucks
01:36SPEAKERand that's more than I'm paying for this.
01:38SPEAKERBut I bought last year's version,
01:39SPEAKERwhich were cheap the other day and I got them
01:41SPEAKERand they're old guy shoes.
01:43SPEAKER- Wait, aren't they the same kind?
01:45SPEAKERHow did that happen?
01:45SPEAKER- The design changes every year.
01:47SPEAKERI can hold it up, but like the upside is-
01:50SPEAKER- Let's real time gauge your flexibility.
01:52SPEAKERCan you get your foot into frame?
01:54SPEAKER- I just took it off.
01:56SPEAKERSo here's the old one.
01:57SPEAKER- Okay.
01:58SPEAKER- The old one's gray, has like a foamy sole.
02:01SPEAKER- There's something H.R. Giger-esque about those laces,
02:03SPEAKERI'm afraid, but otherwise, you know,
02:05SPEAKERthat's kind of like a futuristic shoe.
02:07SPEAKER- I thought that was a selling point actually.
02:08SPEAKERAnd then these are the new ones and they have Adidas
02:12SPEAKERin huge letters across the front.
02:13SPEAKER- What in the world?
02:14SPEAKER- And they're white, they're real, real white.
02:17SPEAKER- I don't know if I'd say those are old guy.
02:18SPEAKERI could see those being fashionable in some context.
02:21SPEAKER- I think they feel like old guy shoes.
02:23SPEAKERThey're like, wow, the design is completely different
02:25SPEAKERfrom year to year, apparently.
02:26SPEAKER- Well, the main thing that's the same
02:28SPEAKERis the sole is the same.
02:29SPEAKERAnd like the fact that it's a slip-on
02:31SPEAKERwith some sort of stretchy upper is the same every year,
02:34SPEAKERI think.
02:35SPEAKER- I mean, if you want to talk about
02:35SPEAKERwhat defines old guy footwear.
02:38SPEAKER- I mean, they're not new balances.
02:39SPEAKER- I think it's the preference for slip-ons,
02:40SPEAKERwhich to be clear, I am completely sold on.
02:43SPEAKER- Like I have shoes with laces for hiking
02:45SPEAKERand sporting activities, power walking.
02:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:50SPEAKER- You know, go to the mall, mall stomping.
02:51SPEAKER- Yes, sometimes you need a secure fit,
02:53SPEAKERbut then sometimes you just want to glide in there and go.
02:56SPEAKER- Well, the thing is, if I'm in the kitchen,
02:57SPEAKERI'm cooking, I'm on my feet for a long time.
02:59SPEAKERLike I made some pizza dough today, right?
03:00SPEAKERI was in there for like 30 minutes at a time,
03:02SPEAKERkneading and stirring and whatnot.
03:05SPEAKERAnd I wanted my arches supported.
03:07SPEAKERI wanted to be comfortable.
03:08SPEAKERSo I was walking on clouds.
03:09SPEAKER- Yeah, look, I get it.
03:11SPEAKERI am on my first and so far only pair of slip-on shoes.
03:14SPEAKERThere's some Skechers, they were cheap, but.
03:17SPEAKER- Okay, do you do like a sandal slide ever?
03:20SPEAKERLike a slide, like a shower sandal type situation,
03:23SPEAKERlike an Adidas slide or a, you know,
03:25SPEAKERit's like an arch top, you put your foot in,
03:27SPEAKERit's got a soft cushion, like you wear them to the pool.
03:29SPEAKER- I thought you meant to wear into the shower.
03:31SPEAKER- Well, I mean, in college,
03:32SPEAKERyou would have worn them into the shower
03:33SPEAKERso you don't get some sort of foot fungus.
03:35SPEAKER- Yes.
03:36SPEAKER- But now we're adults, we don't have that problem anymore.
03:38SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
03:39SPEAKER- But I like a slide too.
03:40SPEAKERSomebody stole my slides at the pool a couple of weeks ago.
03:42SPEAKER- That is, that sounds like a pool foul to me.
03:45SPEAKER- I was pretty upset.
03:46SPEAKER(upbeat music)
03:50SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:15SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
04:17SPEAKERI'm Will.
04:18SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.
04:19SPEAKER- Brad, we're gonna do something new today.
04:22SPEAKER- New?
04:23SPEAKER- Yeah, we're gonna, okay, we're gonna sit down.
04:26SPEAKER- New is scary.
04:27SPEAKER- And we're gonna make a list of all of the software
04:30SPEAKERand we're gonna rank it.
04:32SPEAKER- Okay, sounds like a great idea
04:35SPEAKERthat everyone will receive lovingly.
04:37SPEAKER- We're just gonna start at the top
04:39SPEAKERand we're gonna come up with, we're gonna like,
04:40SPEAKERthrow out ideas and we're gonna be like,
04:41SPEAKERokay, this one's better than, no, no,
04:42SPEAKERwe're not gonna do that.
04:43SPEAKER- Never done that before.
04:44SPEAKER- People were upset by that
04:45SPEAKERand we're never gonna talk about it again.
04:47SPEAKERBut we are gonna do the thing that we did
04:49SPEAKERthe last time we referenced the listing of all software.
04:53SPEAKER- Which was?
04:54SPEAKER- Well, we picked an important piece of hardware,
04:58SPEAKERan important piece of technology that changed the market.
05:02SPEAKER- A product, if you will.
05:04SPEAKER- A product that changed everything that came after it
05:07SPEAKERand we talked about why it changed it
05:08SPEAKERand we did a little bit of a,
05:10SPEAKERhey, here's what it was like at the time
05:11SPEAKERwhen this thing came out.
05:12SPEAKERIt was the Xbox 360, for folks who don't remember.
05:15SPEAKERYou look at it with the benefit of hindsight,
05:17SPEAKERwhich is the best kind of site, it turns out.
05:19SPEAKER- Yes, well, you know.
05:21SPEAKER- Look, Foresight's good.
05:22SPEAKER- Foresight also, I mean,
05:23SPEAKERdepending on how accurate it is, Foresight, pretty good.
05:26SPEAKER- Foresight's kind of a crapshoot though, in my experience.
05:28SPEAKER- That is true.
05:29SPEAKERI'm pulling that episode up.
05:30SPEAKERI'll stick it in the show notes.
05:31SPEAKERThat was 183?
05:33SPEAKER- It was episode 183 from,
05:35SPEAKERit was the middle of last year.
05:36SPEAKERIt was like May of last year.
05:38SPEAKER- I'm gonna read the first line of the description.
05:39SPEAKERWe're going to start taking the occasional look
05:41SPEAKERat a product that changed everything
05:43SPEAKERin its respective field.
05:44SPEAKER- Brad, it's occasional.
05:45SPEAKERStarting this week with the game console
05:47SPEAKERthat redefined how consoles work in the online area,
05:49SPEAKERthe Xbox 360.
05:50SPEAKERYes, I suppose occasional does mean roughly once a year.
05:54SPEAKER- You foreshadowed the episode we're doing today,
05:56SPEAKERthe product that we're going to highlight today
05:58SPEAKERin that intro.
05:59SPEAKER- Did I?
06:00SPEAKER- I listened to it right before we recorded
06:01SPEAKERthe episode here.
06:03SPEAKERYou said, were you gonna look at some
06:05SPEAKERmaybe minor products you said?
06:07SPEAKERLike the Intellimouse Explorer,
06:09SPEAKERwhich was, for folks who don't know,
06:12SPEAKERit was 19, the year was 1999.
06:14SPEAKER- The year, it was a massive period of change
06:18SPEAKERin the PC space.
06:20SPEAKER- We said this before,
06:21SPEAKERwhile we were going over the notes for this,
06:23SPEAKERevery time we try to talk about like setting the stage
06:26SPEAKERin terms of the era,
06:27SPEAKERit just sounds like a really shitty
06:29SPEAKERStar Wars opening crawl.
06:30SPEAKER- Yeah, the Empire, Microsoft,
06:33SPEAKERwas taking over all of PCs.
06:36SPEAKERApple was down and out.
06:37SPEAKERIt was a bad time for a lot of stuff.
06:40SPEAKERBut no, no, it was,
06:42SPEAKERthis was like 1999 was in smack dab
06:44SPEAKERin the middle of the transition of the PC
06:47SPEAKERfrom a business tool and a thing for weird nerds
06:50SPEAKERto a thing that everybody had in their house.
06:51SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:52SPEAKERYeah, it's turned out to be a great time
06:54SPEAKERfor just rapid advances in like say computer accessories.
06:57SPEAKER- Yeah, like, and it was also kind of the first time
07:01SPEAKERthat like, you could go to a normal store local to you
07:05SPEAKERand just buy computer stuff.
07:07SPEAKERLike before that, before 1998, 1995 really,
07:11SPEAKERlike you, if you needed a new mouse,
07:13SPEAKERyou had to go to some weird screwdriver shop
07:15SPEAKERon the other side, on the bad side of the train tracks.
07:18SPEAKERAnd it was usually dimly lit.
07:19SPEAKERThere was some guy in the back smoking cigarettes.
07:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:22SPEAKER- And like they were all sitting up on those high stools,
07:25SPEAKERbut on low counters.
07:26SPEAKER- Yes, the beards were substantial.
07:28SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, it was like maybe,
07:29SPEAKERmaybe if you also wanted ham radio parts,
07:31SPEAKERthey had those in there.
07:33SPEAKERBut in 1999, you could walk into any Best Buy
07:35SPEAKERin the country and you could buy like,
07:36SPEAKERyou could choose between five different mice.
07:38SPEAKER- Yeah, like Best Buy was my example here.
07:41SPEAKERDo you know what year they started?
07:42SPEAKER'Cause I think this is around the time
07:43SPEAKERI remember them starting to spring up everywhere.
07:45SPEAKERAnd they were, at least where I live,
07:47SPEAKERthey were the first like big box retailer
07:49SPEAKERwhere you could go get computer stuff.
07:50SPEAKER'Cause we didn't have, we didn't have Fry's or Micro Center,
07:53SPEAKERassuming those even existed at that point.
07:55SPEAKER- We had a CompUSA in Knoxville,
07:56SPEAKERbut that was opened before that.
07:58SPEAKERBut Best Buy opened in like '96, '97 in North, where I was.
08:02SPEAKER- Sure.
08:03SPEAKER- Definitely when I was in college.
08:05SPEAKERSo, so yeah, it was like, it was an exciting time.
08:07SPEAKERThere was a lot of stuff happening in PCs.
08:09SPEAKERWe were getting like, computer speakers were going
08:12SPEAKERfrom like these little crappy plastic unamplified boxes
08:16SPEAKERthat plugged in and would kind of make sounds come out.
08:18SPEAKEROr in some cases, just a thing you plugged
08:20SPEAKERinto your motherboard and went bah!
08:22SPEAKER- Yep.
08:23SPEAKER- To like a real ass Altec Lansing speaker setter,
08:26SPEAKERCambridge SoundWorks speaker setter, something like that.
08:28SPEAKER- Yeah, this was exactly the era
08:30SPEAKERof the Cambridge SoundWorks PC works, cubes,
08:34SPEAKERthat I feel like everybody who ever touched Quake
08:37SPEAKERgot all at the same time.
08:38SPEAKER- If you read, if you read Shaq News,
08:40SPEAKERyou got those, or sorry, Scaries Quake Holio
08:43SPEAKERback then, I think.
08:44SPEAKERAnd if you read Redwood Stomped,
08:46SPEAKERyou got the Altec Lansing ACS '97, '96s.
08:50SPEAKER- Yes, but like, you know, like PC speakers
08:51SPEAKERwith actual subwoofers, optical mice,
08:53SPEAKERwhich we will talk about here, you know,
08:55SPEAKER3D accelerators were getting good.
08:56SPEAKERLike USB was finally starting to show up in everything.
08:59SPEAKER- Yeah, if you had Windows 98, you could even use USB.
09:02SPEAKERIt was really exciting.
09:03SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, it was, it was an exciting time
09:04SPEAKERto be using computers, 'cause everything got,
09:06SPEAKERplug and play for that matter.
09:07SPEAKERAlthough that's not a, it's not a physical accessory,
09:10SPEAKERbut you know, like computing got really good
09:12SPEAKERin the late '90s.
09:13SPEAKER- And at the same time, like PC gaming was,
09:16SPEAKERlike action PC gaming was taking off.
09:18SPEAKERFirst person shooters were rising.
09:20SPEAKERThere was a, there was a large online community
09:22SPEAKERof people who were playing these new kind of action,
09:24SPEAKERlike Twitch games on their PCs that happened,
09:27SPEAKERlike A, because the CPUs were getting faster,
09:30SPEAKERbut also because 3D acceleration was starting, right?
09:32SPEAKERWhere 3D effects was shipping the, had shipped the Voodoo
09:34SPEAKERand was onto the Voodoo 2 by this time.
09:37SPEAKERWe were seeing early cards from Nvidia
09:39SPEAKERand early 3D accelerators from ATI and Matrox
09:42SPEAKERand a bunch of other companies.
09:44SPEAKERAnd one of the things that came out of this
09:46SPEAKERwas these communities, these online game communities
09:48SPEAKERwere talking about what games were,
09:50SPEAKERwhat mice were good for games,
09:51SPEAKERwhat mice were good for first person shooters.
09:54SPEAKERAnd at the time, a mouse was a fairly standard design.
09:58SPEAKERIt was like two buttons, maybe three if you were fancy.
10:01SPEAKERIt had a big ball in the bottom and you rolled it
10:04SPEAKERon a neoprene mat on your desktop
10:08SPEAKERand they were basically all the same.
10:11SPEAKERLike there were some that were better than others.
10:12SPEAKERSome had, some of the buttons were less likely
10:16SPEAKERto double click.
10:17SPEAKERSometimes the mouse wheel would be a little bit stickier,
10:19SPEAKERa little bit less sticky, whatever.
10:22SPEAKERAnd then in 1999, the year was 1999,
10:27SPEAKERa scrappy software company in Redmond, Washington.
10:31SPEAKER- Upstart hardware maker.
10:33SPEAKER- An upstart hardware maker released
10:35SPEAKERthe IntelliMouse Explorer.
10:37SPEAKER- I mean, to be fair, like I don't know how early
10:39SPEAKERMicrosoft was in hardware at this point, right?
10:41SPEAKERI mean, they obviously didn't start as a hardware company.
10:43SPEAKERI mean, this was around the time
10:44SPEAKERthat I remember hearing though, like,
10:47SPEAKERhey, Microsoft hardware is actually quite good, you know?
10:49SPEAKER'Cause this was very much in the era of the Microsoft
10:52SPEAKERwith a dollar sign, micro shit, you know,
10:54SPEAKEReverybody hated Microsoft.
10:55SPEAKER- You went to Slashdot, their Microsoft stories
10:58SPEAKERhad a little icon of Bill Gates dressed up
11:00SPEAKERlike a Borg on it.
11:01SPEAKER- Right, like Microsoft was widely seen
11:03SPEAKERas a brand to avoid, but then like around the time
11:06SPEAKERthis mouse came out and some of the keyboards at this time,
11:08SPEAKERpeople were like, oh, like Microsoft hardware
11:09SPEAKERis actually like surprisingly quite good.
11:12SPEAKER- Yeah, so they had made a mouse for a while.
11:13SPEAKERThey'd made mice for a while.
11:14SPEAKERThey were making game pads and game controllers.
11:16SPEAKERAnd like, this is when we were starting to get
11:18SPEAKERinto the force feedback era and seeing some weird
11:21SPEAKERforce feedback, joysticks and wheels
11:22SPEAKERand stuff like that for them.
11:24SPEAKERBut the IntelliMouse Explorer was the sequel
11:26SPEAKERto their original IntelliMouse.
11:28SPEAKERIt was a, the IntelliMouse was the first mouse with a wheel,
11:31SPEAKERwith a scroll wheel.
11:32SPEAKER- Okay, that was gonna be one of my questions
11:33SPEAKERis if the scroll wheel predated the optical sensor,
11:36SPEAKERI could not remember, but did that actually happen
11:38SPEAKERaround the same time?
11:39SPEAKER- Yeah, so the scroll wheel happened a few years before.
11:41SPEAKERThey rolled it out as a, hey, you can now make your,
11:44SPEAKERthis is for making it easier to go up and down
11:47SPEAKERin your windows, which I am, as always with Microsoft,
11:51SPEAKERI assume that they had some user research
11:52SPEAKER'cause even back then they were still,
11:54SPEAKERthey were really good at user research.
11:56SPEAKERAnd they saw that people moving the cursor over
11:58SPEAKERto the sidebar was a problem.
12:02SPEAKERIt's funny in retrospect, right?
12:03SPEAKER- Sure, now that I think about it, I guess,
12:05SPEAKERI guess the rise of the scroll wheel
12:06SPEAKERmirrored the rise of the web.
12:09SPEAKER- 100%.
12:09SPEAKER- If people were doing documents, obviously,
12:11SPEAKERlike people were writing doc files and stuff on their PCs,
12:13SPEAKERbut you don't scroll those up and down that much, you know,
12:15SPEAKERand you page up and down or you're just typing
12:17SPEAKERto scroll those, you know, like the very long form document
12:21SPEAKERthat you need to scroll vertically, rapidly
12:23SPEAKERwas pretty much started with the web, right?
12:25SPEAKER- Yep, one-headed scrolling invented
12:27SPEAKERwith the dawn of the web.
12:29SPEAKERYou can snicker for a moment and then we'll move on.
12:31SPEAKER- Just gonna let that one pass.
12:33SPEAKER- But yeah, so the mouse wheel had been out for a while.
12:35SPEAKERThe Intellimouse Explorer was a fairly standard,
12:37SPEAKERsorry, it's a fairly standard design by modern standards,
12:40SPEAKERbut it was pretty revolutionary at the time.
12:42SPEAKERIt wasn't beige, it was this kind of silvery metallic.
12:46SPEAKERIt had two main buttons, a clickable scroll wheel,
12:48SPEAKERjust like the Intellimouse, the original Intellimouse.
12:51SPEAKERIt added two thumb buttons, which was interesting.
12:54SPEAKERI think by default, they bound to forward and back.
12:57SPEAKER- Yes.
12:58SPEAKER- Your browser controls.
12:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think even more than the scroll wheel,
13:00SPEAKERthose side buttons were a thousand percent
13:03SPEAKERjust browser forward and back buttons.
13:05SPEAKER- Yeah, they were, I think that's why it had Explorer
13:08SPEAKERin the name was 'cause it was designed to work
13:09SPEAKERwith Internet Explorer, you know, the hot new browser
13:12SPEAKERfrom those scrappy kids up in Redmond.
13:16SPEAKERThe mouse wheel had been, was super useful.
13:19SPEAKERThis was, I think the Intellimouse is where
13:21SPEAKERthe scroll three lines default started.
13:23SPEAKER- Okay.
13:24SPEAKER- 'Cause Logitech mice would scroll single line
13:26SPEAKERand Intellimice would scroll multiple lines.
13:30SPEAKERAnd that stayed the way it was until like track pads
13:32SPEAKERtook over 10, 15 years later.
13:35SPEAKER- What's your scroll style these days, the clicky?
13:38SPEAKER- I like a, I use a G Pro, a Logitech G Pro Superlight.
13:42SPEAKER- Is that one of the ones that can kind of release
13:45SPEAKERthe tension on the wheel and just let it glide?
13:47SPEAKER- No, it's the ultimate lightness,
13:48SPEAKERso they get rid of that mechanism.
13:50SPEAKERSo mine is clicky, I'm a clicky wheel.
13:53SPEAKER- Yes, no, I also am maybe surprised to hear
13:55SPEAKERI like the old style clicky, but mine is one of the ones
13:58SPEAKERthat will just scroll infinitely if you let it.
14:00SPEAKER- I like a weighted spinner, but not for games.
14:04SPEAKERAnyway, the mouse had a red tail light.
14:07SPEAKERIt was pretty exciting.
14:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I remember that being kind of a big selling point.
14:10SPEAKERIt's just like, look at it, it's glowing.
14:12SPEAKER- Yeah, the whole bottom was this translucent plastic
14:14SPEAKERand it had a red tail light because it was the first mouse
14:16SPEAKERthat had an optical sensor, well, asterisk.
14:21SPEAKERIt was the first mouse that had an optical sensor
14:22SPEAKERthat didn't require some special mousepad.
14:26SPEAKERThere were a bunch of mice that predated it
14:30SPEAKERthat shipped from, like Sun Microsystems
14:32SPEAKERshipped with their Spark stations,
14:34SPEAKERan optical mousepad that had a special
14:36SPEAKERreflective mouse surface that would reflect
14:40SPEAKERa signal down into the mouse and then back up
14:42SPEAKERinto the sensor on the mouse.
14:45SPEAKERBut those mousepads sucked.
14:47SPEAKERYou couldn't use them for games, really.
14:48SPEAKERThe thing slid around on the desk like crazy.
14:51SPEAKERIt was nice 'cause you didn't have to clean it,
14:54SPEAKERbut other than that, not a mainstream product,
14:56SPEAKERnot something normal people were gonna buy.
14:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I went and checked.
14:59SPEAKERI mean, you're probably unsurprised to hear
15:01SPEAKERthat optical mice, the concept of the optical mouse
15:03SPEAKERhad been demonstrated as early as like 1980
15:06SPEAKERthat I think MIT and Xerox like independently
15:09SPEAKERboth were working on it at the time,
15:10SPEAKERbut obviously took, as usual, took a couple of decades
15:14SPEAKERfor all the parts and stuff that was required
15:16SPEAKERto reach consumer grade pricing.
15:19SPEAKERSo why does an optical mouse, why does the first,
15:23SPEAKERoh, it costs $80, which was kind of a lot
15:25SPEAKERfor a mouse back then.
15:27SPEAKER- Yes, but also when you think about how,
15:30SPEAKERI'm thinking back to the mice I owned before one of these.
15:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
15:34SPEAKER- Extremely worth it.
15:36SPEAKERLike I think I remember at the time
15:37SPEAKERwhen I got one, although I did not get this one,
15:39SPEAKERI got the Intel mouse optical, I believe,
15:41SPEAKERwhich we'll get to 'cause there were a bunch of variants
15:43SPEAKERthat we'll talk about.
15:44SPEAKERBut I remember by the time I got it,
15:47SPEAKERI was like, whatever, I'll just take,
15:48SPEAKERwhatever, take whatever you want,
15:50SPEAKERgive me one of these things, like ball mice are so awful.
15:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so why does this rate product
15:56SPEAKERthat changed an entire market?
15:58SPEAKERYeah, I'm gonna argue that this mouse
16:01SPEAKERspawned pretty much the entire gaming specialty hardware
16:04SPEAKERmarket indirectly.
16:06SPEAKER- Man, that's a pretty broad claim, but I'll hear you out.
16:10SPEAKER- Yeah, there was, before this,
16:12SPEAKERRazer had released their first gaming mouse,
16:14SPEAKERwhich they called the Boom Slang.
16:16SPEAKERIt was a big, wide, flat guy with a ball,
16:20SPEAKERit was a ball mouse, mechanical mouse, two buttons,
16:22SPEAKERand I think it had a wheel.
16:23SPEAKER- Wow, I don't think I realized
16:25SPEAKERRazer had been around that long.
16:27SPEAKER- Yeah, Razer had been around for a minute.
16:29SPEAKERIt may have been the same summer,
16:30SPEAKERbut it was like the Razer,
16:31SPEAKERthe Boom Slang had been out before this.
16:33SPEAKER- Okay.
16:34SPEAKER- This was a PS2 and USB mouse, also worth mentioning.
16:36SPEAKERThe reason this was a big deal
16:40SPEAKERis because it moved the fidelity of mouse tracking
16:43SPEAKERfrom a mechanical sensor to a digital sensor.
16:46SPEAKERAnd we should talk about how mice worked,
16:48SPEAKERI think, before we go any further,
16:50SPEAKER'cause it makes, it's important.
16:53SPEAKERA mechanical mouse had a ball in the bottom,
16:55SPEAKERit was in a little well.
16:56SPEAKERThere was a cap on the bottom of the well
16:58SPEAKERthat kind of held the ball in place,
17:00SPEAKERand it floated in this space.
17:02SPEAKERBut when you pushed the mouse on a surface,
17:04SPEAKERthe ball would roll, and that would roll two rollers
17:07SPEAKERthat were placed on an X and Y axis facing each other,
17:11SPEAKERlike 90 degrees off of each other, inside the mouse.
17:15SPEAKERThose little rollers, when the ball rolled,
17:17SPEAKERwould turn these big wheels,
17:18SPEAKERand the wheels were usually attached to a photo diode.
17:22SPEAKERSo the wheels had holes in them,
17:24SPEAKERand then there was a photo diode that straddled the wheel.
17:26SPEAKERAnd one side would produce a little bit of light,
17:28SPEAKERand the other side had a light sensor.
17:30SPEAKERAnd the wheel would have a grate, like a screen almost,
17:34SPEAKERlike a series of dark and light holes,
17:36SPEAKERand I guess knot holes, I don't know, spokes, basically.
17:41SPEAKERSo when the wheel spun, when the rotor spun,
17:44SPEAKERthe wheel would turn,
17:46SPEAKERand the light would pass through the holes,
17:48SPEAKERand the pattern, the speed of the light in the dark,
17:51SPEAKERwould tell the mouse logic
17:54SPEAKERhow fast it was moving in the X or Y direction.
17:57SPEAKERNow, the upshot of this,
17:59SPEAKERand there were other ways that people did this,
18:00SPEAKERlike it wasn't all wheels shining through lights.
18:02SPEAKERI think actually the boom slang
18:03SPEAKERused a slightly different mechanism.
18:05SPEAKERBut it was still roller turns wheel,
18:08SPEAKERwheel triggers an electric sensor,
18:10SPEAKERthat sends a signal that can be interpreted
18:11SPEAKERas acceleration and velocity.
18:16SPEAKERThe upshot of this is that the size of the holes
18:19SPEAKERand the size of the wheel,
18:20SPEAKERand thus the physical space inside the mouse,
18:23SPEAKERdetermined, imparted a hard upper limit
18:26SPEAKERto the mechanical mouse precision.
18:28SPEAKER- Okay, that was gonna be exactly my question,
18:30SPEAKERis that the DPI, the fidelity of these things,
18:33SPEAKERI think had to be pretty limited, right?
18:35SPEAKER- It was very low, especially by modern standards.
18:37SPEAKERAnd the other thing is the slippage of the ball
18:40SPEAKERagainst the rollers also caused problems with acceleration.
18:44SPEAKERSo if you move the mouse too quickly,
18:45SPEAKERthe ball would just slide on the surface.
18:48SPEAKERIf your mouse pad didn't have enough friction,
18:50SPEAKERif the ball and the mouse pad didn't have enough friction,
18:52SPEAKERif you've got enough hand gunk into the ball of the mouse,
18:56SPEAKERthen it would slide on the rollers
18:57SPEAKERand you would lose precision.
18:59SPEAKER- For people who were not alive at the time,
19:01SPEAKERlike every one of these had like a little kind of turn,
19:03SPEAKERlike a dial turn release mechanism,
19:05SPEAKERwhere you could kind of pop a door off and take it out,
19:07SPEAKERtake the ball out,
19:08SPEAKERbecause you had to clean that thing quite regularly.
19:10SPEAKER- You had to clean the ball
19:11SPEAKERand you had to scrape goo off of the rollers,
19:13SPEAKERwhich was the bad part.
19:14SPEAKER- Dust and gunk.
19:15SPEAKER- It was like belly button gunk.
19:17SPEAKER- Yeah, ugh, what was the composition
19:20SPEAKERof the average mouse ball?
19:21SPEAKERLike they were the kind of like silicone rubber covered,
19:23SPEAKERyeah, something like that.
19:25SPEAKER- They were usually pretty heavy.
19:26SPEAKER- Pretty weighty, pretty dense, I remember.
19:28SPEAKER- Well, 'cause they had to be a certain amount,
19:29SPEAKERthey had to be a certain amount of mass to like,
19:32SPEAKERthey needed to ride and make the rollers move
19:36SPEAKEReven when they were being pushed up
19:38SPEAKERby the surface underneath them.
19:39SPEAKERYou also, like it's funny thinking about it now,
19:42SPEAKERyou needed a pretty even surface.
19:44SPEAKERLike if your desk was uneven, the ball would lose,
19:46SPEAKERwould skip and like you would lose traction.
19:50SPEAKERIt was, anyway, fast movements, sudden movements,
19:54SPEAKERsudden stops, all of that were bad for these mice.
19:57SPEAKERAnd as a result, like we didn't,
20:00SPEAKERthis is why a lot of the early shooters
20:01SPEAKERdidn't have headshots, I think,
20:02SPEAKERis 'cause you couldn't actually land them
20:04SPEAKERwith those, with any kind of precision.
20:06SPEAKER- You get a fair amount of jitter also
20:08SPEAKERwhen you picked it up, you know,
20:09SPEAKER'cause that jostled the ball
20:10SPEAKERand that would move the mechanics a little bit
20:12SPEAKERas you were lifting and setting it down.
20:14SPEAKER- Yeah, and you had to clean the ball too.
20:16SPEAKERNope, most people didn't clean their balls.
20:19SPEAKER- Make sure you always clean your balls.
20:20SPEAKER- Always keep your mouse balls clean.
20:23SPEAKERSo, okay, upper limit, the rotary encoders
20:25SPEAKERhad an upper limit that was caused by the sensors.
20:28SPEAKERAnd just to be clear, if we hadn't,
20:31SPEAKERif somebody hadn't developed these optical sensors,
20:34SPEAKERthere probably would have been another advancement
20:36SPEAKERthat gave us better DPI on a more mechanical process, right?
20:40SPEAKERLike it's, I'm not saying that this is the only way
20:42SPEAKERthis could have been solved.
20:43SPEAKERWe could have used different kinds of sensors
20:44SPEAKERfor the rotary encoders, all sorts,
20:46SPEAKERthere's a million different ways
20:47SPEAKERyou could solve this problem.
20:48SPEAKERBut this is the one we did and it worked out really well
20:51SPEAKERbecause the way optical mice work is you had a light source,
20:57SPEAKERyou had a CMOS sensor and it's basically a little camera.
21:01SPEAKERAnd then you had the signal from that CMOS sensor
21:05SPEAKERgot captured hundreds or thousands of times a second
21:09SPEAKERand it got piped into a DSP, a digital signal processor,
21:12SPEAKERthat detected differences in those images.
21:15SPEAKERAnd by measuring the number of pixels,
21:17SPEAKERthe markings on the, you know,
21:20SPEAKERthe image shifted one direction or the other,
21:22SPEAKERit could infer motion of the mouse
21:23SPEAKERand was less, there was no physical moving parts,
21:27SPEAKERthere was no slippage between the ball and the rollers,
21:29SPEAKERthere was no place for gunk to get,
21:31SPEAKERalthough if you did get like, I used to get dog hair in mine
21:35SPEAKERand that would jack it up at all at a horrific level.
21:41SPEAKERBut it was a much better solution.
21:43SPEAKERAnd the benefit is that it went from being something
21:46SPEAKERthat required mechanical advancements
21:48SPEAKERand sensor advancements there to just being,
21:52SPEAKERhey, this is all made of silicon.
21:53SPEAKERAnd Brad, you know what we're really good at optimizing?
21:55SPEAKER- What's that?
21:56SPEAKER- Silicon.
21:57SPEAKER- Yeah, that does make sense.
21:58SPEAKERI mean, when I think about this though,
21:59SPEAKERlike it's not, 1999 was not exactly the dark ages,
22:02SPEAKERbut when I think about the kind of like image processing
22:03SPEAKERthat needs to take place to track,
22:05SPEAKER'cause you're not just tracking change over time,
22:08SPEAKERit's directional change.
22:09SPEAKERLike you need very precise detection of which direction
22:13SPEAKERthe image is changing from frame to frame.
22:15SPEAKERAnd I wonder like,
22:16SPEAKERI don't know what the algorithms were like at the time.
22:18SPEAKERIs it just like one frame compared to the previous frame
22:20SPEAKERor are they doing it across multiple frames?
22:22SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
22:22SPEAKERLike thinking about the hardware that was available
22:25SPEAKERat the time to do this kind of processing.
22:27SPEAKERMy guess is that it's gotten much more complicated
22:29SPEAKERin the last 20 years.
22:30SPEAKER- Yes, and the speed with which you need to do it
22:33SPEAKERto make it feel real time and feel responsive and accurate,
22:36SPEAKERfeels like a lot for a consumer device at this time,
22:39SPEAKERbut obviously they solved it.
22:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, the upshot of this though,
22:44SPEAKERis that in the 20 years since this mouse came out,
22:46SPEAKER25 years since this mouse came out,
22:49SPEAKERwe've gotten from, hey, every mouse has a ball
22:52SPEAKERwith these plastics circles on it that have holes cut
22:56SPEAKERand that we shine light through,
22:58SPEAKERto a $30 mouse has like an 8K DPI sensor
23:03SPEAKERand you can get a $70 mouse that pulls at a thousand Hertz
23:05SPEAKERwith a high resolution sensor wirelessly, right?
23:08SPEAKER- That's a lot of fidelity.
23:09SPEAKERThat's probably more than all
23:12SPEAKERbut the highest level e-sportest athlete
23:16SPEAKERprobably is looking for.
23:17SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yeah, we've reached a point
23:18SPEAKERwhere on a $150 mouse,
23:21SPEAKERmost people can't physically move their arm faster
23:24SPEAKERthan the mouse can track.
23:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
23:26SPEAKER- Which is kind of crazy.
23:27SPEAKERAnd it cracks at a high degree of accuracy,
23:29SPEAKERthere's no slippage, there's no lag,
23:31SPEAKERthere's no, all that stuff is good.
23:35SPEAKERI think this might, I haven't been able to confirm this,
23:38SPEAKERbut my recollection is that this is the first mouse
23:40SPEAKERI ever saw with more than, with the thumb buttons too.
23:44SPEAKERI think the optical sensor is the big C change here,
23:48SPEAKERbut I think the thumb buttons,
23:52SPEAKERwe saw a massive explosion in mice shortly after this,
23:55SPEAKERright, like both mice for work,
23:58SPEAKERlike the rise of the Logitech started doing,
24:02SPEAKERthey did haptic mice.
24:03SPEAKERThey did mice with like haptics that bumped
24:07SPEAKERwhen you moved over UI interface stuff,
24:10SPEAKERor when you shot in Half-Life, stuff like that.
24:12SPEAKERYou saw mice that had the free spinning wheel
24:15SPEAKERthat you mentioned before.
24:16SPEAKERYou saw mice that had, that were designed to play wow
24:19SPEAKERand had like nine thumb buttons on them.
24:22SPEAKER- I think, wasn't there a mouse that had like
24:23SPEAKERsomething like 20 programmable buttons at one point?
24:26SPEAKERLike that was like deep into the MMO heyday, I think.
24:28SPEAKER- Yeah, you saw mice that were modular,
24:30SPEAKERthat you could take a chunk,
24:32SPEAKERthere was one that I think Razer made
24:34SPEAKERthat had three side panels.
24:36SPEAKEROne was like a circle, one was like that big 20 button grid,
24:40SPEAKERand one was just normal two buttons.
24:42SPEAKERYou saw ambidextrous, you saw right-handed mice.
24:45SPEAKERYou never saw left-handed mice,
24:46SPEAKER'cause, sorry lefties, not my choice.
24:49SPEAKERBut you saw mice that were modular.
24:52SPEAKERYou saw mice that you could add weight to.
24:53SPEAKERYou saw mice that you could remove weight to.
24:55SPEAKERYou saw, like at one point I reviewed a mouse
24:57SPEAKERthat had a grate on the back and had a little fan inside
25:00SPEAKERof the blue air on your hand to keep your hand dry
25:02SPEAKERwhen you were playing games.
25:04SPEAKER- That seems maybe less than practical.
25:06SPEAKER- It sucked, it was a bad mouse.
25:08SPEAKERBut the upshot is, and I realize this is like
25:10SPEAKERthe sixth time I've said upshot in this episode,
25:12SPEAKERbut it was, there was, in the same way
25:16SPEAKERthat like the game controllers in the late 90s
25:19SPEAKERwere out of control and everybody was trying to develop
25:21SPEAKERa first-person shooter controller,
25:23SPEAKER'cause they thought they would then be the flight stick
25:27SPEAKERfor this burgeoning market.
25:29SPEAKERThe same thing was happening in the mouse space.
25:31SPEAKERLike every crazy idea was getting made.
25:33SPEAKERAnd a lot of really interesting stuff happened
25:34SPEAKERas a result of it.
25:35SPEAKERAnd I think it all started because of this
25:38SPEAKERIntel mouse Explorer 1.0.
25:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so.
25:41SPEAKERSo should we go through the product line,
25:44SPEAKERbecause there are actually like what,
25:45SPEAKERat least half a dozen different Intel mouse products,
25:48SPEAKERIntel mouse branded products,
25:49SPEAKERbut they're fairly different.
25:51SPEAKER- Well, there's one really important thing to say
25:53SPEAKERabout this mouse before we go on.
25:56SPEAKERIt's that this optical sensor kind of sucked.
25:58SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
25:59SPEAKER- It wasn't great.
26:00SPEAKERIt was, you didn't have to clean it, which was really nice.
26:04SPEAKERIt was fine for games if you move,
26:06SPEAKERif you were like a low sensitivity,
26:09SPEAKERlots of big movements player, right?
26:11SPEAKERIf you had a big mouse pad and you were moving
26:14SPEAKERyour whole arm constantly across your thing,
26:15SPEAKERif you were like a little, just flick of the wrist person,
26:18SPEAKERprobably not a great mouse for you.
26:20SPEAKERAnd there was a lot of talk in the community at the time.
26:24SPEAKERWhen I reviewed, I think I reviewed this,
26:26SPEAKERthe followup to this, the second gen of this,
26:28SPEAKERnot the first gen,
26:29SPEAKER'cause I wasn't a maximum PC yet at this time.
26:31SPEAKERI did not realize how many people were quick flick people
26:37SPEAKERat the time.
26:38SPEAKERAnd a lot of that was because I was used to using balls,
26:43SPEAKERso I was using slow mouse movements and all that.
26:46SPEAKERAnd a lot of people had learned to kind of counteract
26:48SPEAKERthe acceleration of the ball and work within that
26:50SPEAKERso they could do quick, quick, quick, quick turns
26:52SPEAKERat really high sensitivity.
26:53SPEAKERAnyway, it doesn't matter.
26:56SPEAKERBut it was like the sensors improved dramatically
26:59SPEAKERin a really short period of time.
27:00SPEAKERBecause like I said, they're silicon
27:01SPEAKERand we're good at making,
27:02SPEAKERwe got much better at making CMOS sensors
27:04SPEAKERover the 10 years following
27:05SPEAKER'cause we started putting them in,
27:07SPEAKERlike we started making phone camera, not phone cameras,
27:09SPEAKERpoint and shoot cameras out of CMOS sensors.
27:11SPEAKERAnd DSLRs eventually got made out of CMOS sensors.
27:13SPEAKERSo now we're really, really good,
27:15SPEAKERit turns out, at making CMOS sensors.
27:17SPEAKERSame thing for GSPs.
27:19SPEAKERAnyway, they spawned a whole bunch
27:22SPEAKERof other IntelliMouse out of this.
27:25SPEAKERThe first one was the 2000 IntelliMouse optical
27:31SPEAKERwith IntelliEye, that's the ambidextrous one.
27:33SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's the one I had.
27:35SPEAKER- And it was kind of a lighter, it was a beige.
27:37SPEAKERIt was beige with red highlights.
27:38SPEAKERI think it still had the tail light though.
27:40SPEAKER- I don't know if I'd call it,
27:41SPEAKERI think it was more of a off-white, maybe cream,
27:45SPEAKERor maybe more of a grayish white.
27:47SPEAKER- It didn't look like corny beige white
27:50SPEAKERlike you expected from your shitty beige box,
27:52SPEAKERno-name power case or whatever.
27:55SPEAKERIt felt like a cool kind of white gray kind of thing.
27:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:59SPEAKER- It felt futuristic.
28:00SPEAKERI don't know how I ended up with that one
28:01SPEAKER'cause it seems like the IntelliMouse Explorer
28:04SPEAKERwith the ridge, the hump is the one
28:07SPEAKEReverybody looks back on fondly,
28:09SPEAKERbut I liked the optical quite well.
28:11SPEAKER- Well, the Explorer was also,
28:12SPEAKERit was one of the early ergonomic designs, right?
28:15SPEAKER'Cause a lot of the others were flat and small
28:17SPEAKERand you weren't supposed to be using them
28:19SPEAKERfor eight hours a day, right?
28:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:21SPEAKER- They released a version of the original IntelliMouse,
28:23SPEAKERthe beige one with an optical sensor
28:25SPEAKERinstead of a ball almost immediately.
28:27SPEAKERCouldn't find a date on that actually,
28:30SPEAKERbut I did find the original press release
28:32SPEAKERfor the IntelliMouse.
28:35SPEAKER- Yeah, the deeper I get into data preservation,
28:38SPEAKERdata archiving, going back and looking
28:39SPEAKERfor not just my old data,
28:41SPEAKERbut also just across the internet,
28:42SPEAKERstuff like this that is rapidly disappearing.
28:45SPEAKERI can't believe Microsoft still has like all
28:47SPEAKERof their old press releases in the same modern interface.
28:51SPEAKERThis thing is literally dated April 19th, 1999.
28:54SPEAKERMicrosoft sleek new IntelliMouse Explorer
28:56SPEAKERand IntelliEye technology
28:57SPEAKERtossed out the mouse ball today at Comdex.
29:00SPEAKER- It's kind of amazing.
29:01SPEAKERThis is when we saw two Comdex.
29:02SPEAKERThis was a spring Comdex, not fall Comdex.
29:07SPEAKERBut they talk about gone are the mouse ball
29:09SPEAKERand other moving parts inside the mouse.
29:10SPEAKERMicrosoft IntelliEye equips the IntelliMouse Explorer
29:13SPEAKERwith an optical sensor and digital signal processor,
29:15SPEAKERhelping it avoid its traditional enemies
29:17SPEAKERsuch as crumbs, dust, and grime.
29:19SPEAKERIt'll track movement on virtually any service
29:21SPEAKERas long as it, well, they don't say this,
29:23SPEAKERbut it was as long as it wasn't shiny.
29:24SPEAKERIf it was glass or metal, it was a hard no-go.
29:27SPEAKER- Yes.
29:28SPEAKER- Can you imagine using a computer designed in 1968?
29:32SPEAKERSaid Tim McDonough, mouse line product manager at Microsoft.
29:35SPEAKERYet we think nothing of using 30-year-old mouse technology.
29:39SPEAKER- This is some real Hank Hill salesmanship here.
29:42SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:43SPEAKER- The fact that they marketed it,
29:45SPEAKERthey tried to brand the optical sensor as they don't say,
29:48SPEAKERI guess they do say optical sensor in here,
29:50SPEAKERbut they don't say IntelliEye.
29:53SPEAKERThey don't say, they're trying to make it a thing.
29:56SPEAKER- In the header, yes.
29:56SPEAKERIntelliEye, a new approach and a smarter mouse.
29:59SPEAKERIntelliMouse just rolls off the tongue.
30:02SPEAKERIntelliEye, like two vowels up against each other like that.
30:05SPEAKER- It's hard.
30:06SPEAKERIt's a hard grade. - That was an off day
30:07SPEAKERin the marketing department, I'm afraid.
30:09SPEAKER- In addition to IntelliEye optical tracking technology
30:12SPEAKERand radical design, IntelliMouse Explorer
30:14SPEAKERfeatures two customizable function buttons
30:16SPEAKERthat add an unprecedented level
30:18SPEAKERof convenience and flexibility.
30:20SPEAKERThe buttons located on the left side of the mouse
30:22SPEAKERprovide effortless internet navigation
30:24SPEAKERwith forward and back default settings,
30:26SPEAKERbut they can be remapped easily
30:28SPEAKERto other useful programming commands
30:29SPEAKERsuch as print, copy, paste, or save.
30:31SPEAKERCan you imagine putting print on your thumb button?
30:33SPEAKERThat would be annoying.
30:35SPEAKER- You know, I guess I could see use for it.
30:37SPEAKERYou're working in an office maybe and have a gaming mouse.
30:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess I have to print a lot.
30:41SPEAKERLooking at this thing now, like it's kind of crazy to me
30:43SPEAKERthat I somehow ended up with that ambidextrous optical
30:46SPEAKERwith the back and forward buttons
30:48SPEAKERon either side of the mouse,
30:49SPEAKERbecause these days I feel like it's like buttons
30:52SPEAKERaround your thumb is where back and forward go now, right?
30:55SPEAKERSo like, I think I was like thumb and pinky finger
30:58SPEAKERto go forward and back at that time.
30:59SPEAKERAnd that's just kind of weird thinking about now.
31:02SPEAKER- Look, it's nice that they make the ambidextrous mouse
31:04SPEAKERfor the left-handers, but I'm not interested.
31:07SPEAKERI guess I'm using one right now, but don't tell anybody.
31:10SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, so they made the, let's see,
31:13SPEAKERthey made the Intellimouse the ambidextrous one.
31:14SPEAKERThey updated it in 2001, upgrading the sensor
31:18SPEAKERfrom a 1500 frames per second sensor,
31:20SPEAKERwhich gave you a maximum flick speed
31:22SPEAKERof 1.5 meters per second to a 6,000 frames per second sensor.
31:26SPEAKERI don't know how fast the flick speed was on that,
31:28SPEAKER'cause they didn't care about that by that point.
31:31SPEAKERThey updated it again in 2006.
31:33SPEAKERThis is the famed Intellimouse Explorer 3.0.
31:37SPEAKERThis is, I think, maybe the most controversial sensor,
31:40SPEAKER'cause by that time other people
31:42SPEAKERwere doing better stuff for games.
31:44SPEAKERIt had a little bit of a stair-steppy
31:46SPEAKERwhere you could move vertically and horizontally,
31:50SPEAKERbut it was on different ticks,
31:51SPEAKERso there was weird stuff happening there.
31:54SPEAKERIt was a 9,000 frames per second sensor in 2006,
31:57SPEAKERand I think 3,000 DPI, but I'm not 100% on that.
32:01SPEAKER- Okay, so 2006, thinking back,
32:04SPEAKERis I feel like other mice, other brands,
32:06SPEAKERhad caught up pretty dramatically by that point,
32:08SPEAKER'cause I think that's right around the time
32:09SPEAKERI got my Logitech MX518,
32:11SPEAKERwhich is probably my favorite mouse of all time,
32:14SPEAKERif I really had to put it down on a list.
32:16SPEAKER- I think if this was, if we were talking about
32:22SPEAKERthe thing that made gaming mice a real thing,
32:24SPEAKERit's the 518, probably.
32:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:26SPEAKER- Right, that was the first one that I looked at.
32:27SPEAKERI was like, "Oh, this is actually a really good mouse."
32:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it felt really great in the hand
32:31SPEAKERwith the thumb groove and everything for action games.
32:35SPEAKERObviously, they owe a pretty significant debt
32:37SPEAKERto Microsoft for kicking this stuff off.
32:39SPEAKER- The 518 came out in...
32:43SPEAKER- I think it was 2006, also, or 2005, sorry,
32:46SPEAKERright before the 3.0 Intel Mouse Explorer.
32:49SPEAKER- Yeah, and the 518 was the first mouse
32:51SPEAKERthat I saw with a variable DPI,
32:55SPEAKERwhere you could adjust the DPI on the unit.
32:57SPEAKERSo you could, there were two buttons
32:59SPEAKERthat could make the DPI go up or down,
33:01SPEAKERwhich, it's funny, in the modern era,
33:03SPEAKERI don't ever do it all at the time,
33:05SPEAKERplaying Battlefield and stuff like that.
33:06SPEAKERI remember turning the DPI down to snipe.
33:09SPEAKER- Really?
33:10SPEAKERI always thought it was a cool feature and concept
33:12SPEAKERthat I never felt like I could actually use
33:13SPEAKERpractically on the fly.
33:15SPEAKERI don't know what the cognitive effect is
33:17SPEAKERof being used to a certain input tick rate
33:20SPEAKERor smoothness, you know?
33:21SPEAKERYour brain gets thrown off very quickly, right?
33:24SPEAKER- There's a muscle memory thing, right?
33:26SPEAKER- Yeah, or like a perception memory,
33:28SPEAKERsort of something, a perception muscle there.
33:31SPEAKERLike I've been playing Fallout 1 on stream recently,
33:34SPEAKERand because it's such an old game,
33:35SPEAKERthe mouse sampling, the control is extremely different.
33:38SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
33:39SPEAKER- And I don't bother to change my Windows settings
33:40SPEAKER'cause I don't want to have to redo everything afterwards.
33:43SPEAKERBut when I come out of that game
33:44SPEAKERafter two or three hours of playing it,
33:45SPEAKERthe mouse in Windows feels like it's broken,
33:49SPEAKERlike it literally-- - Insanely fast?
33:50SPEAKER- No, no, sluggish, because it's so much faster,
33:52SPEAKERit's so much more sensitive. - Oh wow.
33:54SPEAKER- Right, I think it might be
33:55SPEAKERthat there's no mouse acceleration
33:57SPEAKERin Fallout, and actually mouse acceleration
33:59SPEAKERmight be its own topic to talk about here
34:01SPEAKERbecause I think that was also probably getting a lot better
34:04SPEAKERor becoming a lot more widespread at this time.
34:05SPEAKERBut yeah, when I go back into Windows from Fallout,
34:07SPEAKERlike the mouse, the input feels completely wrong
34:11SPEAKERbecause I've just for two or three hours
34:13SPEAKERhave been doing something different.
34:13SPEAKERSo like the idea of changing DPI mid-shooter match
34:17SPEAKERalways just felt like it would throw me off too much.
34:20SPEAKER- Do you leave acceleration on?
34:22SPEAKER- I do, I just, whatever Windows is,
34:23SPEAKERthe default is what I, can you even change that at this point?
34:26SPEAKER- I don't know that you can anymore.
34:27SPEAKER- I don't know if they still expose that.
34:30SPEAKER- Pointer options, enhanced pointer precision, that's off.
34:33SPEAKER- It also depends on which control panel you're in
34:35SPEAKER'cause I assume they're still both in here.
34:36SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, they're both in here.
34:37SPEAKER- I don't know which one overrides which.
34:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't see acceleration in here anymore,
34:41SPEAKERwhich I think is gone, means it's gone.
34:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I think you're right actually.
34:45SPEAKER- Well, you shouldn't need it on a modern mouse
34:47SPEAKER'cause the DPI is such that you can move from side to side
34:51SPEAKERacross your screen without, yeah.
34:53SPEAKER- So actually that's something I wanted to take
34:55SPEAKERthe opportunity of this episode to ask you about
34:57SPEAKER'cause you probably know, is there a sweet spot to be found
34:59SPEAKERor could you help explain the relationship between DPI
35:03SPEAKERon the mouse and sensitivity in your operating system
35:06SPEAKERand like any other variables you can tweak there
35:07SPEAKERand like what's the best, like is it like high DPI,
35:11SPEAKERlow sensitivity in software the best way to go
35:13SPEAKERor vice versa, like what are the best practices there?
35:16SPEAKER- So there's probably a whole episode here
35:18SPEAKERand I don't, I said it five, six, seven years ago
35:23SPEAKERwhen I started getting into PUBG pretty hard.
35:26SPEAKERI do high DPI and very, very low sensitivity.
35:29SPEAKER- Okay, that's kind of, that's what I've moved to recently.
35:32SPEAKERMy mouse, I don't know what the highest DPI is on this.
35:35SPEAKERI've got a G502X Logitech now.
35:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like 20,000 probably at least.
35:40SPEAKER- Okay, I am now defaulting to like 3,600 DPI.
35:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I'll be honest, I haven't put the Logitech software
35:49SPEAKERback on this new computer in the last nine months.
35:53SPEAKERI think that it, I think that I usually do four, 5,000,
35:58SPEAKER6,000, something like that, much more than that
36:00SPEAKERand it moves too fast even at the lowest possible setting
36:03SPEAKERin Windows, but the idea is you want there to be no judder
36:10SPEAKERon, like you want every pixel on Windows on your screen
36:14SPEAKERto have multiple samples on the mouse.
36:18SPEAKERSo you get really, it's kind of like AA for mouse movements.
36:23SPEAKER- Sure.
36:24SPEAKER- Anti-aliasing, not.
36:26SPEAKER- Yes, it took me a second, but I got it.
36:28SPEAKERI just looked up the spec, 25,600 DPI, is that right?
36:33SPEAKER- Yeah, my SuperLite will do 30,000, I think.
36:36SPEAKERI can't remember, it's 28,000.
36:37SPEAKER- What have I been doing all this time?
36:39SPEAKER- Well, so there's two things, there's two, okay.
36:42SPEAKERActually, I think there is probably a whole episode here
36:44SPEAKER'cause there's also the sample rate,
36:45SPEAKERwhich is usually limited by what your USB bus can handle,
36:48SPEAKERwhich is usually like 1,000 samples a second.
36:50SPEAKERThe thing is the mouse is gonna sample inside that
36:53SPEAKERmore often than that 1,000 times a second
36:55SPEAKERon most high-end mice, I believe.
37:00SPEAKERI think if people are interested in this,
37:02SPEAKERplease leave comments and we'll do a full episode.
37:06SPEAKERI kinda wanna get somebody, maybe we see if Wes comes on
37:08SPEAKERand talks about how to set up the mouse the right way.
37:12SPEAKERBrad's making a really good face over there.
37:14SPEAKER- I'm making a, I just changed the mouse DPI to 20,000.
37:17SPEAKER- Yeah, can you see the mouse as it goes across the screen?
37:20SPEAKER- This cursor is out of control.
37:22SPEAKER- Yeah, yep, you're not gonna be able
37:23SPEAKERto play Fallout anymore, I'm sorry.
37:25SPEAKERI might have to tweak some sensitivity stuff.
37:27SPEAKEROkay, but by and large though, you do recommend
37:29SPEAKERlike super high DPI and then just turn the,
37:31SPEAKERset the sensitivity slider way down.
37:33SPEAKER- I do super high DPI and really low sensitivity.
37:36SPEAKER- Okay.
37:37SPEAKER- And then I basically bring the sensitivity
37:39SPEAKERas high as I can keep it and get the sensitivity
37:41SPEAKERin the games to be where I want.
37:42SPEAKERUsually when I have a game, the sensitivity's like 0.1
37:45SPEAKERif it's a zero to one scale.
37:48SPEAKERLike 1% to 5% is where my sweet spot is.
37:51SPEAKERAnyway.
37:52SPEAKER- I set it to 25.6 now, it is unusable until I tweak it.
37:56SPEAKER- Yeah, you're gonna have to turn it down.
37:58SPEAKERSo yeah, that's it.
37:59SPEAKERLike it knocked loose all of this, right?
38:02SPEAKERLike this optical sensor and the fact that we went
38:05SPEAKERfrom like literally a ball that spins a wheel
38:10SPEAKERthrough a photo diode to, you know,
38:14SPEAKERlight illuminating a sensor and the sensor sending data
38:17SPEAKERto a DSP and the DSP doing some like pretty simple diffs.
38:21SPEAKERRight, it's like, hey, this part of the image is the same,
38:23SPEAKERthis part's different, so it's moved this many pixels.
38:25SPEAKERAnd that translates to an X and Y movement.
38:28SPEAKERIs pretty straightforward.
38:30SPEAKERNow there was a bunch of stuff that came out
38:31SPEAKERfor that's kind of interesting.
38:32SPEAKERLike you asked about laser mice.
38:35SPEAKERFor a brief moment in what, like 2000, mid 2000s,
38:38SPEAKERI think laser mice got popular.
38:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I remember there being,
38:41SPEAKERmaybe this was very marketing driven.
38:42SPEAKERI know there was actual technology under the hood,
38:44SPEAKERbut I feel like laser mouse quote unquote was a big,
38:47SPEAKERwas a big like front of box bullet point.
38:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so obviously once the sensors got
38:54SPEAKERto a certain point, you were probably good.
38:56SPEAKERLike for most people, you know, your G5 or G9
39:01SPEAKERfrom like 15 years ago at this point is probably fine.
39:04SPEAKERHowever, the red illuminated or I guess now
39:07SPEAKERwe use mostly infrared lights for optical mice.
39:11SPEAKEREventually they work really well on opaque
39:15SPEAKERand translucent surfaces.
39:19SPEAKERThey don't work on anything that's reflective at all.
39:23SPEAKERSo a couple of companies built a sensor that basically,
39:27SPEAKERinstead of using a red LED to illuminate,
39:29SPEAKERused an infrared laser that shot out the bottom.
39:33SPEAKERAnd it basically gave a finer control over the reflectance
39:37SPEAKERso that it would work on reflective surfaces
39:40SPEAKERand even would illuminate into the reflective surfaces.
39:43SPEAKERSo like you'll, the sensor would pick up light
39:45SPEAKERinside the glass theoretically,
39:47SPEAKERif you were on like a glass desktop.
39:49SPEAKERNow, was it good for games?
39:51SPEAKERNo, absolutely not.
39:53SPEAKERBut could you sit on a glass top table
39:55SPEAKERin your hotel room when you were traveling
39:57SPEAKERwith your laptop and use the mouse?
39:59SPEAKER100%.
40:00SPEAKERYou didn't have to bring a mouse pad with you,
40:02SPEAKERwhich was really nice.
40:03SPEAKERThe laser mice didn't work well for most people
40:08SPEAKERbecause they actually had the higher precision
40:11SPEAKERon the sensor gave it a higher error rate
40:13SPEAKERwhen it was using a uniform surface
40:14SPEAKERlike a normal mouse pad.
40:16SPEAKERSo you'd get skips and hops and jumps,
40:19SPEAKERor you could actually move it fast enough
40:21SPEAKERthat you would move out of its field of view
40:24SPEAKERbecause the field of view was a little bit smaller
40:26SPEAKERon most of them.
40:27SPEAKERInteresting.
40:28SPEAKERAlso, there was perceived lag on all of them.
40:31SPEAKEREvery one of them I ever used was felt laggy.
40:33SPEAKERAnd I don't really know why that was.
40:35SPEAKERI had no idea that we were not still using this stuff.
40:38SPEAKERI just assumed, I mean, I have not kept up
40:40SPEAKERwith mouse technology to be clear,
40:41SPEAKERbut I just assumed the laser was a unilateral improvement
40:44SPEAKERover the old optical stuff
40:45SPEAKERand that it was still in use in some fashion.
40:46SPEAKERBut I guess not.
40:47SPEAKER- Well, so the nice thing was,
40:49SPEAKERthere was a period of time when there was real benefit
40:51SPEAKERto keeping up with mouse technology.
40:53SPEAKERAnd from 2000 to 2010,
40:59SPEAKERwe went through this whole thing
41:00SPEAKERwhere everybody started adding removable weights to mice.
41:04SPEAKERWireless got good enough to play games with.
41:06SPEAKERSuddenly Logitech in 2012
41:09SPEAKERrolled out a wireless mouse charger
41:11SPEAKERthat you just put the mouse on this pad
41:13SPEAKERand put a little transceiver, little antenna
41:16SPEAKERin where the mouse wheel ball hole would be
41:20SPEAKERon a traditional mouse.
41:22SPEAKERAnd it charges the mouse for you
41:24SPEAKERwhen it's just sitting on the pad.
41:25SPEAKERIt's really nice.
41:29SPEAKERThe thing is though, after that,
41:32SPEAKERafter the sensors hit like 20,000 DPI, you're probably good.
41:36SPEAKERIf you had a wireless mouse that you liked,
41:38SPEAKERyou're probably okay.
41:38SPEAKER- That's kind of something I've been thinking
41:40SPEAKERas we've been talking through this stuff
41:41SPEAKERis where else is there to go for core mouse technology?
41:44SPEAKERObviously, you can add customizable buttons
41:46SPEAKERand different wheel types
41:48SPEAKERand whatever you can think of on the input end,
41:50SPEAKERlike the user interface end,
41:52SPEAKERbut for the core tracking technology,
41:54SPEAKERwhat else is there to do?
41:56SPEAKERI guess nothing.
41:57SPEAKER- Well, so what happened in the late 20 teens,
42:00SPEAKERlike around the PUBG rise when Valorant was taking off,
42:02SPEAKERall of that kind of stuff,
42:04SPEAKERis fast Twitch shooters for the PC came back.
42:08SPEAKERCounter Strike, Counter Strike Go hit
42:09SPEAKERand people were playing that kind of game again
42:12SPEAKERin kind of a big way
42:13SPEAKERand the enthusiasts started looking at weight
42:17SPEAKERand instead of adding more weight to their mice,
42:19SPEAKERlike we did through most of the last decade preceding,
42:22SPEAKERthey were like, well, what if we carve out
42:23SPEAKERa bunch of this plastic
42:24SPEAKERand take out all of the stuff we're not using?
42:27SPEAKERAnd we saw like Final Mouse and Glorious
42:29SPEAKERand eventually Logitech and some of the other companies
42:32SPEAKERfollow on with mice that were well under 100 grams,
42:35SPEAKERwhich was unthinkable five years before.
42:38SPEAKER- Yeah, this is how you may have seen.
42:39SPEAKERYou start getting these like really,
42:42SPEAKERthey're kind of disturbing looking to me,
42:44SPEAKERthese weird like hollowed out, like honeycomb,
42:47SPEAKERporous looking mice that are literally full of holes.
42:50SPEAKER- Yeah, or they'll do things like print them
42:52SPEAKERwith aerated plastic so that there's bubbles in the plastic
42:55SPEAKERor stuff like that.
42:58SPEAKERLike I said, even mainline,
43:00SPEAKERlike Logitech does super light mice now
43:02SPEAKERwhere it's just an ambidextrous mouse
43:04SPEAKERwith two thumb buttons, like super bare bones,
43:08SPEAKERreally nice sensor, and it weighs like 80 grams.
43:10SPEAKERSo that's the current final frontier.
43:16SPEAKERAs always, trends come and go, new mice,
43:19SPEAKERnew things in mice.
43:22SPEAKERSome professional will come along and be like,
43:25SPEAKERI'm all about that Naga life.
43:27SPEAKERAnd they'll dig out their 20 year old razor mouse
43:32SPEAKERwith 30 buttons on the side.
43:34SPEAKERAnd they'll be like, we need more buttons.
43:35SPEAKERWe've got to have 12 buttons on each finger for this thing.
43:39SPEAKERBut until then, I think the ultra lights
43:41SPEAKERare the kind of the hotness.
43:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and again, the actual, the image processing,
43:46SPEAKERthe tracking itself pretty settled at this point.
43:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think we're gonna see any,
43:51SPEAKERI don't think, I mean, look, the DPIs will go higher,
43:54SPEAKERbut whether Windows will let you accommodate them
43:56SPEAKERis the big question I have.
43:58SPEAKER- Sure, sure, a couple of just random questions
44:01SPEAKERand other little things to touch on before we go.
44:04SPEAKERYou may have mentioned this, what is the exact method
44:07SPEAKERof illumination that's being used now?
44:08SPEAKERBecause if you pick up your fancy modern gaming mouse,
44:13SPEAKERthere is no light, there is nothing there.
44:15SPEAKERSo is it entirely some spectrum that is invisible to the eye?
44:19SPEAKER- It is indeed.
44:20SPEAKERYeah, it's infrared generally.
44:21SPEAKERIf you aim your phone camera at it,
44:23SPEAKERyou can see, you'll see it glow a little bit red
44:25SPEAKERwhen you look down the hole.
44:26SPEAKERIt's also a lot less light because the modern CMOS sensors
44:29SPEAKERare a lot more light sensitive than they were in 1999.
44:32SPEAKER- Sure, which helps with battery life, I'm sure,
44:34SPEAKERfor the wireless ones.
44:35SPEAKER- It does indeed.
44:36SPEAKERThe bummer though is we don't have the cool underlighting
44:39SPEAKERthat we had. - I know.
44:40SPEAKERThat little glowing red tail was effective marketing
44:45SPEAKERat the time.
44:46SPEAKER- The other thing is the radio has changed too.
44:48SPEAKER'Cause this is one of those things
44:50SPEAKERthat we originally thought Bluetooth
44:51SPEAKERwas gonna be really good for.
44:52SPEAKERAnd it turns out Bluetooth radios are fine
44:54SPEAKERfor normal desktop mouse use,
44:57SPEAKERbut probably a little bit slow for high-end.
45:00SPEAKERThis is why Logitech has the charging pad
45:03SPEAKERfor gaming mice, right?
45:05SPEAKER'Cause a normal desktop mouse
45:07SPEAKERthat updates a few hundred times a second
45:09SPEAKERwill run on a double A battery for a month.
45:12SPEAKERA gaming mouse will run for four days,
45:14SPEAKERfor five days, or eight days,
45:15SPEAKERor something on that same period.
45:17SPEAKERSo you do want...
45:21SPEAKERIf you're gonna play games with a mouse,
45:24SPEAKERit's worth getting something that uses a different...
45:25SPEAKERIf it's gonna be wireless,
45:26SPEAKERyou want something that's gonna run
45:27SPEAKERat a higher frequency update
45:30SPEAKERthan your typical Bluetooth radio will.
45:32SPEAKER- Yeah, which is, if I'm reading this correctly,
45:35SPEAKERroughly 125 to 500 hertz is about the best you're gonna do
45:38SPEAKERon a Bluetooth mouse. - On Bluetooth, yeah.
45:40SPEAKER- From the looks of things. - Yeah.
45:42SPEAKER- Versus easily over a thousand or more.
45:45SPEAKER- The other thing that happens on non-gaming mice
45:47SPEAKERis that they're really aggressive
45:48SPEAKERabout when they go to sleep and power profiles.
45:51SPEAKERSo if you're sitting there and you're...
45:53SPEAKERSay you're playing Counter-Strike
45:54SPEAKERand you're covering a corner
45:55SPEAKERand you're guarding your corner,
45:57SPEAKERyou're just holding it, right?
45:59SPEAKERHolding that corner, holding that corner,
46:01SPEAKERyou don't move your mouse at all
46:02SPEAKER'cause you don't wanna bloom out your cursor.
46:04SPEAKERYour mouse goes to sleep and dude pops out
46:06SPEAKERand you press the button and the mouse wakes up
46:08SPEAKERand it doesn't register that for a shot and you're dead.
46:10SPEAKER- Fun. - Yeah.
46:12SPEAKERMouse never go to sleep, never let the mouse sleep.
46:14SPEAKER- Yeah, the only other thing I was gonna touch on real quick
46:17SPEAKERgoing back to the, straight up back to '99,
46:20SPEAKERthe switch from PS2 to USB, I know you touched on that,
46:22SPEAKERlike the IntelliMouse, is it shipped with an adapter?
46:26SPEAKERIs that what it was?
46:26SPEAKER- I think so, I don't actually have mine anymore.
46:31SPEAKERIt's in the garage someplace.
46:32SPEAKERI couldn't find it when I went and looked,
46:34SPEAKERbut I believe it had a USB to PS2 adapter.
46:38SPEAKER- That's what I remember.
46:39SPEAKER- It might've gone the other way
46:40SPEAKER'cause sometimes they shipped the other way
46:41SPEAKERwhere you had a PS2 dongle that plugged into USB,
46:44SPEAKERbut I think Microsoft was usually the,
46:47SPEAKERI think Logitech shipped, I'm not, don't quote me on this,
46:50SPEAKERbut I think Logitech shipped PS2 to USB
46:53SPEAKERand Microsoft shipped USB to PS2
46:56SPEAKER'cause they were usually pretty pro USB at Microsoft.
47:00SPEAKER- Yes, that would make a lot of sense.
47:02SPEAKER- But the thing to remember is USB in that era
47:05SPEAKERdidn't update, the polling rate was pretty low.
47:09SPEAKERIt wasn't until later that we figured out
47:10SPEAKERhow to overclock the polling rate
47:12SPEAKERand get it up to a thousand hertz.
47:13SPEAKER- But that's the thing I was gonna bring up.
47:15SPEAKERI feel like I remember that being done
47:17SPEAKERfor the PS2 port as well, do you remember around this time?
47:19SPEAKERI think there were tweaks you could do for both
47:21SPEAKER'cause I feel like I also remember
47:22SPEAKERyou could up the polling rate on the PS2 port
47:24SPEAKERin Windows for smoother mouse.
47:27SPEAKER- It was just adjustable in the BIOS, I thought.
47:29SPEAKER- Maybe that's what it was.
47:30SPEAKER- Or Northbridge, there was a Northbridge,
47:31SPEAKERthere was a setting that you could do.
47:32SPEAKERIt may have just, it also just ran faster than USB did.
47:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so I feel like to this day,
47:37SPEAKERmaybe this is just people being set in their ways.
47:39SPEAKERI feel like I still see some pro gamers
47:42SPEAKERwho cling to PS2 ports from ICE
47:44SPEAKERbecause they're basically wired more directly to the CPU
47:47SPEAKERthan having to go through the whole USB stack.
47:49SPEAKER- I think that most of the modern,
47:51SPEAKERmy guess is that you're better,
47:53SPEAKERyour modern hardware is going to be better
47:56SPEAKERthan that in every, like this is like the LCD situation
47:58SPEAKERwhere for a long time, our monitors were worse
48:01SPEAKERand then CRTs and then suddenly like 10 years
48:05SPEAKERafter LCDs kind of took off, you looked up
48:08SPEAKERand you're like, oh, these monitors are actually better
48:10SPEAKERin pretty much every way except for maybe phosphor glow.
48:13SPEAKER- Yeah.
48:14SPEAKER- I think you're in a similar situation there,
48:15SPEAKERbut I could be wrong.
48:16SPEAKERI'd be, if there are any pros in the audience
48:18SPEAKERthat are hanging onto their PS2 mice,
48:20SPEAKERI would love to hear from you.
48:22SPEAKER- Definitely.
48:24SPEAKER- But yeah, so it's, I thought this was,
48:27SPEAKERI was kind of surprised by this.
48:28SPEAKERI hadn't, like we had this on the list
48:31SPEAKERfor this feature years ago
48:34SPEAKERand I kind of, we started talking about it
48:37SPEAKERand I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
48:38SPEAKERThis is like what a, who would have thought
48:42SPEAKERwhen this weird mouse with a red tail light
48:44SPEAKERand that was silver, like nobody made silver hardware
48:47SPEAKERback then. - Yeah.
48:49SPEAKER- When this, it looked almost metallic.
48:50SPEAKERWhen it came out, it was like weirdly humped.
48:53SPEAKERYou picked it up and you're like, oh, this looks weird,
48:55SPEAKERbut then you used it and you're like,
48:56SPEAKERoh, this is very comfortable, I like this.
48:57SPEAKERIt was, it worked for people who claw gripped,
49:00SPEAKERit worked for people who palm gripped, had okay buttons.
49:04SPEAKERAs I recall, the wheel was pretty squishy,
49:07SPEAKERbut you didn't have to clean the finger gunk
49:10SPEAKERout of the ball every day.
49:12SPEAKER- And that made all the difference.
49:13SPEAKER- Like just to be clear, cleaning your mouse,
49:16SPEAKERcleaning your rollers was like every day,
49:17SPEAKERevery other day, if you use the computer all day,
49:19SPEAKERit was awful. - Yeah, brody.
49:22SPEAKER- Brody, really gross.
49:23SPEAKER- And again, you know, not to harp on it,
49:25SPEAKERbut like the idea that it was Microsoft
49:27SPEAKERthat ushered in this change and brought out,
49:29SPEAKERbrought about this massive advancement in mice technology,
49:32SPEAKERstill to this day, kind of crazy.
49:34SPEAKER- Well, they say what you will about Microsoft.
49:38SPEAKERI mean, they had their problems in that time period,
49:40SPEAKERespecially, but they were pretty good about doing,
49:44SPEAKERabout swinging their weight to drive things forward.
49:47SPEAKERAnd I think like a bad example of that
49:49SPEAKERis how they handled Internet Explorer, right?
49:52SPEAKERThis is a good example of how they did it.
49:54SPEAKER'Cause like, who knows what would have happened.
49:56SPEAKERWe would have had, somebody would have invented
49:58SPEAKERsome sort of crazy rotary encoder
49:59SPEAKERthat was four times the precision.
50:01SPEAKERWe would have ended up with 3000 DPI mice
50:04SPEAKERand that would be where we capped out.
50:06SPEAKERStill be, you'd have a little dedicated mouse ball washer
50:10SPEAKERsitting on your desk that you just drop it in
50:12SPEAKERand it ultrasonically cleans your balls.
50:14SPEAKER- You'd be wearing a proverbial mouse ball around our necks.
50:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:18SPEAKER- Eternally pushing a giant mouse ball up the hill.
50:21SPEAKER- You could buy aftermarket balls
50:23SPEAKERto make your mouse perform a little bit better.
50:25SPEAKER- This is a dark future, I don't wanna.
50:27SPEAKER- Yeah, think about it.
50:28SPEAKER- I don't wanna entertain this anymore.
50:29SPEAKER- You'd have like a speed ball, you'd have a game ball,
50:31SPEAKERyou'd have an RTS ball for all those close tight clicks.
50:35SPEAKERThe bad, bad timeline.
50:38SPEAKERBut I think that's a good place as any
50:39SPEAKERto wrap it up unless you have anything else.
50:41SPEAKER- No, I think that covers it for me.
50:42SPEAKERIt was a fun time in computers.
50:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I'd be curious, are there products and things
50:47SPEAKERand technologies that other folks think would be good
50:49SPEAKERfor this future?
50:51SPEAKERWe have a pretty good list for this.
50:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
50:53SPEAKER- I think it's neat to look at these inflection points,
50:56SPEAKERespecially with the benefit of hindsight
50:58SPEAKERand kind of back into what happened
51:00SPEAKERand see where it started.
51:02SPEAKERAnd I would love to hear suggestions and feedback on this.
51:06SPEAKERIt would be really helpful to us.
51:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess I shouldn't rattle off
51:09SPEAKERany of our other ideas for this.
51:10SPEAKER- No, absolutely not.
51:11SPEAKER- Just yet, save those for when we get around
51:14SPEAKERto those episodes.
51:15SPEAKERBut yeah, especially people just have categories of things.
51:19SPEAKERYou don't even have to necessarily nominate a product
51:22SPEAKERif you would wanna just say, hey, I don't know,
51:25SPEAKERGPUs or maybe the obvious ones are like GPUs,
51:29SPEAKERmobile phones, et cetera, et cetera, stuff like that.
51:31SPEAKERBut maybe if there are like less obvious categories
51:34SPEAKERof products where one thing came along
51:36SPEAKERand just blew the doors off.
51:37SPEAKER- Well, and some of them are really obvious.
51:38SPEAKERSome things just don't,
51:41SPEAKERlike it was just a series of incremental changes over time
51:43SPEAKERand there wasn't one like watershed moment.
51:46SPEAKERBut yeah, like obviously at some point
51:48SPEAKERwe'll probably do an iPhone episode.
51:49SPEAKERI don't know if we need to do an iPhone episode,
51:51SPEAKERbut there's an interesting,
51:52SPEAKERlike maybe there's an iPod Nano episode, right?
51:55SPEAKER'Cause iPod Nano is interesting for a whole bunch of reasons
51:57SPEAKERand we'll get into that at some point in the future.
51:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:01SPEAKER- I think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up
52:02SPEAKERand remind everybody that this is a listener supported
52:05SPEAKERpodcast.
52:06SPEAKER- It is.
52:07SPEAKER- Without you all, we wouldn't be here.
52:08SPEAKER- True.
52:09SPEAKER- So as always, we want to thank all of our listeners.
52:13SPEAKERThank you listeners.
52:15SPEAKER- Thank you listeners.
52:16SPEAKER- But we also want to give a very special thank you
52:18SPEAKERto our executive producer to your patrons,
52:21SPEAKERincluding Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Fiend,
52:25SPEAKERJoel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamik,
52:28SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games Makers, Fractured Veil,
52:30SPEAKERand Pantheon Makers of the HS3 High Speed 3D Printer.
52:34SPEAKERThank you all for your support.
52:35SPEAKERWe do really appreciate you.
52:37SPEAKERAnd if you would like to find out how to support the show,
52:38SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techbod.
52:41SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techbod.
52:43SPEAKERYou can get access to the Discord.
52:45SPEAKERYou can leave us a message in there.
52:46SPEAKERYou can talk about the episode.
52:47SPEAKERPeople are popping off in the episode discords right now,
52:50SPEAKERhaving lovely conversations about things we've talked about
52:53SPEAKERin the last couple of weeks and a whole variety
52:57SPEAKERof other things.
52:58SPEAKERThere was some really heartwarming stuff broke out
53:00SPEAKERin some of the places that I don't expect to see
53:02SPEAKERheartwarming stuff yesterday.
53:04SPEAKER- That's always nice.
53:05SPEAKER- Yeah, it's good.
53:06SPEAKERBut yeah, you can go to patreon.com/techbod
53:08SPEAKERfor five bucks a month to get access to the Discord.
53:10SPEAKERYou get the Patreon exclusive episode every month.
53:13SPEAKERYou get access to, I think,
53:14SPEAKERthe best community on the internet.
53:15SPEAKERAnd that's what I got.
53:19SPEAKERIf you want to hang out with like-minded people,
53:21SPEAKERit's a good place for it.
53:22SPEAKER- It sure is.
53:23SPEAKER- And that'll do it for us this week.
53:25SPEAKEROh, if you don't have five bucks a month,
53:27SPEAKERdon't want to spend five,
53:28SPEAKERcan't spend five bucks a month, that's fine.
53:29SPEAKERLeave a review.
53:30SPEAKERWe love reviews.
53:31SPEAKERReviews help us a lot, too.
53:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
53:32SPEAKER- And you can send an email if you have feedback
53:34SPEAKERon this episode to techbod@content.town.
53:36SPEAKERWe're doing questions next week.
53:38SPEAKER- That's right, so get 'em in.
53:39SPEAKER- Get those Q's in and we will turn them into A's.
53:42SPEAKERThat email again is techbod@content.town.
53:45SPEAKERAnd that will do it for us this week, Brad.
53:47SPEAKERIt's always a pleasure.
53:48SPEAKER- Yeah, same to you, man.
53:49SPEAKER- Talk to you next week and see y'all next week.
53:52SPEAKERBye, everybody.