Optical mouse back in the 80’s, wow! People thought the optical mouse was Microsoft’s innovation because Macintosh didn’t use optical mouse at first.
Optical mouse back in the 80’s, wow! People thought the optical mouse was Microsoft’s innovation because Macintosh didn’t use optical mouse at first.
The first optical mouse was the Xerox Lyon's mouse US4521772 and US4521773, patent granted in 1985 but there were working versions a couple of years earlier than that. The Lyon's mouse used a hexagonal black/white pattern to sense position. Other later optical mice used a multi-colored square grid for position.
Around 1984 I built a laser mouse using IR laser diodes made by the fellow in the lab next door, they were otherwise pretty much unobtainable. I filed for a patent and it was granted in 1988, US4794384. This idea languished at Xerox. Standards for invisible laser beams in the workplace had not been worked out and I had other things to do.
Some smart guys at HP noticed that if you used my hardware and hellishly lit a surface with any appreciable texture you could get position information, and they patented that. Sigh, what can I say, it was my first patent and I hadn't learned to generalize. Got no help from the attorney either.
Logitec introduced the first laser mouse to the market when my patent had a year left to run. I pointed this out to the Xerox attorneys and they couldn't be asked to write a letter for the bucks involved.