From my Facebook Timeline –
I never had the pleasure of seeing one of these (this was before my time), but I do remember the Sun Sparc stations had something like these. The mousepads were awesome!
From what I am reading on Wikipedia, some of these, depending on the design would require that the mouse pad was oriented a certain direction and wouldn’t work if rotated. Wow.
Thanks to my fellow geek Jamie M for this one, who has had plenty of mice in his pad over the years, but he promises all of them can be programmed with macros.
SANTA CLARA, CA – Mouse Systems Corporation’s optical mouse now has software that allows the mouse to function with many application-software packages.
PC Mouse allows users to configure the mouse control keys to send macros of up to 15 characters to the IBM PC. The macros can be assigned to the left, center and right mouse buttons. Separate macros can be assigned for one, two and three clicks for each button.
The Mouse System Corporation’s mouse tracks motion by optically counting grid lines printed on an aluminum “mouse pad.” It connects to the IBM PC through an RS-232 port.
The PC Mouse is priced at $332. The software package is an extra $20.
– InfoWorld Volume 5 number 12