Stanford Mouse Video Archive

serutan writes "Stanford University has a retro-cool series of video clips of a 1968 presentation that foreshadowed the Internet and marked the public debut of the mouse. It is a surreal, weirdly captivating piece of computer history." Part of the site includes a solicitation for those who have memories and stories about the old days of computing, when programs were measured in inches and people felt they were lucky, lucky I tell you, to have ones and zeros.

Anybody remember..

[Space Coyote]

.. How great it was when you figured out that WordPerfect 5.0 had mouse support? Not that anybody had mice back then... After all, it was the 1980's for cryin' out loud.

DEC hockey puck mouse memories

[acomj]

I remember that particular mouse. It was like a big hockey puck, but without a ball. It had two feet that would spin when you moved the mouse. Depending on how both feet spun (together for left and right (cw/ccw for forward and back) it moved the curser (sic). It worked suprisingly well.

I like the new optical mice better though, especially since the "puck" mouse was awkward fit in the hand...

That stanford mouse is too old school

Ahhhhh the good old days...

[MrIcee]

The rush of returning memories... the days when SHUFFLE THE DECK meant more than playing a hand of cribbage... when DEBUGGING meant, not only listening to the program run on AM radio - it meant opening the cabinets and physically removing beetles and moths... when even opening the cabinet was dangerous because they weighed over a ton a piece... and if you opened the front door without opening the back door, it would tip over on you.

Yes... we loved our ones and zeros (not to mention BAUDOT too!)... and we loved the front panel lights where we could actually watch binary flowing through the registers... and who could forget the fantastic rocker switches on the front where you could REALLY man-handle your software.

Yes... the good old days where finding a bug in your program meant that the computer operator simply threw a 2 inch thick printout at you with a scrawled note at the top... YOU HAVE A BUG. And who could forget the chad wars while waiting for a program to compile!

But the thing we ESPECIALLY liked is the fact that there was no Microsoft.... computers were pure and we didn't need 2 gigahertz pentiums in order to take 3 minutes to boot a stupid OS.

The good old days... when computers were computers and programmers actually knew how to program!