Mouse Systems

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Mouse Systems Corporation, formerly Rodent Associates, was founded in 1982 by Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. In addition to being a vehicle for Kirsch's invention, the company was responsible for bringing the mouse to the IBM PC for the first time.

Like all early optical mice, their debut product relied on a special metallic and reflective mousepad printed with a square grid of grey and blue tracking lines: as the device moved over the pad, LED feedback was processed by an on-board microchip, which in turn supplied the host computer with machine-readable tracking data via an RS-232 serial port. An external power supply was required. Some mice would derive their power supply from the keyboard connector on the motherboard and came with a pass-through connector to be inserted before the keyboard cable.

Early Sun workstations used MSC optical mice exclusively. Initial models came with large mousepads with well-spaced lines, while later models were smaller and used a much tighter grid. Although optical mice did not need cleaning, paradoxically they would start behaving erratically after a few years of use due to burn-out of one or the other tracking LEDs.

In 1984 MSC released PCPaint, the first mouse-driven image manipulation program for the IBM PC. PCPaint was developed for the company by John Bridges. Millions of copies were shipped, primarily bundled with all their mice until the early 1990s. PCPaint saw limited commercial success as a standalone product.

KYE Systems, producer of the Genius brand of mice, acquired Mouse Systems in 1990.

[edit] Mouse Pad

One of the famous things about Mouse Systems was their red mouse pads reading "The most accurate data input systems since 19821." Thousands of mouse pads were printed with the "19821" error.