question about PC's

question about PC's

[rob]

Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.

Is there a comparable mouse out there?  Very round, buttons
on the side rather than the top, high resolution, but with a
serial connector?

question about PC's

[boyd]

rob writes:

>    Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.

i'd stay clear of those digital hockey-puck mice  --  they suck.

when i was working for digital i `upgraded' to a logitec serial mouse.

i'm yet to see something come near the Depraz mouse.

question about PC's

[Protius]

rob@plan9.att.com said:
>they generate raw quadrature, but modern machines use serial input.
>the company that makes them sells a serial version, but only two buttons
>work.

It should be possible to take a $10 "modern" mouse, gut it, and feed the
raw quadrature and button switches from the DMD mouse in where the real
buttons and optical encoders used to be.  If you use opto-couplers, it
wouldn't even be a different component (a photo-transistor).  You might
need a seperate power supply for the +5 volts though.

Here is the pinout off of my DMD mouse:
1: +5 volts
2: vertical phase 0
3: vertical phase 1
4: horizontal phase 0
5: horizontal phase 1
6: ground
7: middle button
8: right button
9: left button

-Tommy
tjohnson@cobber.cord.edu

question about PC's

[rob]

> Go on. What happened to it? 

they generate raw quadrature, but modern machines use serial input.
the company that makes them sells a serial version, but only two buttons
work.

question about PC's

[Jeff]

> rob@plan9.att.com writes:

> > Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.

> > Is there a comparable mouse out there?  Very round, buttons
> > on the side rather than the top, high resolution, but with a
> > serial connector?

> I know Digital used to have mice like this, dark grey instead of red
> though.  Try giving them a call and see if they have any more of their
> hockey puck mice left (they look like a hockey puck to us Canadians :-).

I used the DEC hockey puck mouse a little and I found it way too large.
Unless Rob's got large hands, I'm not sure it fits the bill.
Sigh - I tried to get the abandoned/unused equipment from the storage area.
There was some old DEC microVax that I wanted for the huge RGB monitor
and any other parts I could salvage including the aforementioned mouse.
I never got it and it was probably discarded instead of
getting to some use - any use.

On the constructive side, if the DEC mouse is the right size, just
cut a foam ball in half for the desired dome top :-)

The HP mouse I have on my Apollo workstation is a near miss:
a little dome for the palm but the buttons are flat (not on the side)
so your fingers are out straight, not draped over the side
as with the Depraz mouse.

-- Jeffrey Jonas
jeffj@panix.com

question about PC's

[Nigel]

> Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.
> 
> Is there a comparable mouse out there?  Very round, buttons
> on the side rather than the top, high resolution, but with a
> serial connector?
>

Go on. What happened to it? 

question about PC's

[Pete]

>Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.
>
>Is there a comparable mouse out there?  Very round, buttons
>on the side rather than the top, high resolution, but with a
>serial connector?

I've definitely seen a Logitech mouse which looks very much like the classic
version of the device. The trouble is, their range changes so often that
it's hard to remember when and what... and (most unfortunately of all)
whether it was a bus or serial job.

pete
--
Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group,
Dep't of Computer Science, University of York, York, YO1 5DD (+44 1904 433388)
pete.fenelon@minster.york.ac.uk http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/pete/pete.html

question about PC's

[E.Bacic]

rob@plan9.att.com writes:
> 
> Oh man, do I miss my red Swiss mouse.  I pine.  I simper.
> 
> Is there a comparable mouse out there?  Very round, buttons
> on the side rather than the top, high resolution, but with a
> serial connector?

I know Digital used to have mice like this, dark grey instead of red
though.  Try giving them a call and see if they have any more of their
hockey puck mice left (they look like a hockey puck to us Canadians :-).

                                                            emb

question about PC's

[jmk]

As rob mentioned, we tend to assemble our own PC-clone hardware.
I'll attempt to dust-off and put together a list of parts we use
today.

question about PC's

[Steve]

Byron Rakitzis <byron@netapp.com> wrote:
> Additionally, does anyone have any pointers towards a supplier of a
> high-quality keyboard?

I've never had a better keyboard than the NCD "Unix style" keyboard.
It is similar to what the MIPS Magnum 3000's came with.

I plugged one into my Indy the day it arrived, the SGI (PC style) keyboard
is sitting on a shelf. You should be able to buy them from NCD
(cost is about $200 here), ask for the model N-97. You can plug them
into a PC via an adaptor - that's what I'm gonna do on my new Plan 9 PC.

Of course, with acme maybe a good mouse is more important :-)

question about PC's

[Gary]

> This is also a question about recommendation for PC hardware:
> 
> I like the 1 bit display of a Sun 3 or a Sun 4. Is there anything
> comparable in PC land that one can buy? I haven't seen anything except
> color monitors for sale lately.

Grey-scale monitors are quite nice too (anti-aliasing is nice).
However, monochrome and grey-scale monitors are hard to find in
the PC world.  EIZO makes a nice grey-scale monitor, which we were
using here for a while.  I think they might also be called Nanao,
depending on what continent they're marketing in.

Anyone know any other decent multi-synch grey-scale or mono monitors?

question about PC's

[Byron]

This is also a question about recommendation for PC hardware:

I like the 1 bit display of a Sun 3 or a Sun 4. Is there anything
comparable in PC land that one can buy? I haven't seen anything except
color monitors for sale lately.

Additionally, does anyone have any pointers towards a supplier of a
high-quality keyboard?

The kind of monitors and keyboards I see hooked up to PC's these
days don't come anywhere close to the quality of a Sun or even an
NCD X terminal.