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.
Although the Xerox optical mouse was standard equipment with the 6085 in 1985, I do remember seeing an optical mouse being used with the 8010 during a demonstration in 1982. Perhaps this was a demonstration of the prototypes? The experimental versions were being built in 1981. See some great illustrations and background:
Lyon, Richard F. The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors. VLSI·81-1 AUGUST 1981. @ Xerox Corporation 1981.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/VLSI-81-1_The_Optical_Mouse.pdf
Xeroid Binger (1967-1981) checking in. During my last couple of years as a Xerox suit I was in the Beta office for the mouse, the ethernet and the Altos systems. That was in Santa Clara, CA. I took executives from Ford Aerospace, Varian and HP on the corporate jet to Dallas and then on to Rochester to see all of these products in about 1979.
Being in the sales and marketing department we were back on top of technology with the 9700 Laser Printer. I formed a startup company using that product with the idea that we could eventually merge text and graphics. We had four software engineers working on that when suddenly the MAC appears on the scene.
And now the rest is history. We loyalists still use their products. We have the DocuColor 252 installed here. A very nice product. High quality printing with a finisher that folds and staples booklets and catalogs on the fly. We are 75 miles from the nearest service, however the machine never breaks down. As a former Xerox Branch Manager for Technical Service I can tell you that is a really big deal.