Mouse Systems
The company Mouse Systems Corporation (formerly Rodent Associates ) was founded in 1982 by Steve Kirsch , inventor of the optical mouse founded. The company was based in Fremont , California . Besides the fact that the company marketed Kirsch's invention, it was also involved in the introduction of the mouse for the IBM PC .
Like all early optical mice, the first product relied on a special metallic, reflective mouse pad that was printed with a grid of gray and blue track lines. As soon as the mouse was moved over the mouse pad, the reflected light from the LED was evaluated by a built-in microchip , which provided the PC with machine-readable movement data via the serial interface ( RS232 ). An external power supply was still necessary at this point. Some mice also draw their supply voltage from the keyboard connection on the main board of the PC, which was tapped via an adapter between the keyboard cable and the keyboard connection.
Early SUN workstations were only equipped with optical Mouse Systems mice , some SGI workstations were also delivered with them. The first of these were delivered with large mouse pads with clearly recognizable separate lines, the later models were smaller and were printed with a much narrower and finer, predominantly gray grid pattern. In order to improve the sliding properties and not to scratch the mouse pad metal, felt strips were pasted on the underside of the mice. Even though the optical mice didn't actually need cleaning, paradoxically they behaved strangely after a few years of use for no apparent reason.
In 1984 Mouse Systems released the PC Paint program , the first mouse-controlled image processing program for the IBM PC . It was developed by John Bridges . Until the early 1990s, several million packages of this program were mainly delivered with the mice. As its own product without the mouse, it was only granted limited economic success.
Mouse Systems Corporation was taken over in 1990 by the Taiwanese company Kye Systems . Since June 1999, all Mouse Systems activities have been carried out at Kye Systems, the website www.mousesystems.com is no longer accessible.
One of the strange stories of Mouse Systems was the matter with their red mouse pads, which were imprinted with the slogan "Mouse Systems: The most accurate data input systems since 19821" (German: "Mouse Systems: The most accurate data input systems since 19821"). Several thousand of these mouse pads with the incorrectly printed year "19821" were delivered.