[TUHS] Depraz/Logitech Digimouse manual

Rob Pike robpike at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 07:53:48 AEST 2021


I sent a picture (actually two at different resolutions; keep reading) to
the list, but being images they are larger than the address space of a
PDP-11 so not allowed here.

Is it really necessary to have such a low message size limit in an era when
I can buy a terabyte of storage for less than a hundred bucks?

Here is a Google Drive link, for the adventurous.


 20180123-UnixSkeleton.jpg
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aS8ZmzwPUawIa8WXGoXOK9jDiYtJETGG/view?usp=drive_web>


-rob


On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 7:44 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> I sent a higher-res version in which you can read all the text but it was
> "moderated".
>
> This is the Unix room as of the year 2000 or so.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 4:34 AM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The story of the mice, one of which I gave to John:
>>
>> I ran a program called FAST-OS for LANL/Sandia for 6  years starting
>> 2005. Think of it as "Plan 9 on petaflop supercomputers" -- it may
>> seem strange now, but in that era when some top end systems ran custom
>> kernels, there was a strong case to be made that plan 9 was a good
>> choice. By 2011, of course, the Linux tsunami had swept all before it,
>> which is why you no longer hear about custom HPC kernels so much --
>> though in some places they still reign. In any event, this program
>> gave me 6 years to work with "the Unix room", or what was left of it.
>> I had been in the Unix Room in 1978, and even met Dennis, so this
>> prospect was quite a treat.
>>
>> We funded Charles Forsyth to write the amd64 compilers for Plan 9,
>> which if you used early Go you ran into (6c 6a 6l); we also funded the
>> amd64 port of Plan 9 (a.k.a. k10) as well as the port to Blue Gene.
>> That amd64 port is still out and about. You can find the Blue Gene
>> kernel on github.
>>
>> I had lots of fun spending time in the Unix room while working with
>> the late Jim McKie, and others. I saw the tail end of the traditions.
>> They had cookie day once a week, if memory serves, on Thursday at 3. I
>> got to see the backwards-running clock, Ken's chess trophies, his
>> pilot's license, pictures of Peter everywhere, a "Reagan's view of the
>> world" map, the American Legion award for Telstar (which was rescued
>> from a dumpster!), and so on. The "Unix room" was more than one room,
>> all built on a raised floor, as I assume it was former old school
>> machine room space. If memory serves, it filled the entire width of
>> the end of the top floor of the building it was in (4th floor?) --
>> maybe 50 ft x 50 ft -- maybe a bit more. There was a room with desks,
>> and a similar-sized room with servers, and a smaller room containing a
>> lab-style sink, a very professional cappucinno machine, decades of old
>> proceedings, and a sofa. I fixed the heavy-duty coffee grinder one
>> year; for some reason the Italian company that produced it had seen
>> fit to switch BOTH hot and neutral, and the fix was to only switch
>> hot, as the neutral switch had failed; I guess in the EU, with 220v,
>> things are done differently.
>>
>> It was fun being there. A few years later the whole room, and all its
>> history, was trashed, and replaced with what Jim called a "middle
>> management wxx dream" (Jim was never at a loss for words); Jim found
>> some yellow Police crime scene tape and placed it in front of the
>> doors to the new space. It was redubbed "the innovation space" or some
>> such, and looked kind of like an ikea showroom. Much was lost. I tried
>> to find a way to save the contents of the room; I had this dream of
>> recreating it at Google, much as John Wanamaker's office was preserved
>> in Philadelphia for so many decades, but I was too late. I have no
>> idea where the contents are now. Maybe next to the Ark.
>>
>> One day in 2008 or so jmk took me for a tour of the buildings, and we
>> at one point ended up high in the top floor of what I think was
>> Building One (since torn down?), in what used to be Lab Supply. Nobody
>> was there, and not much supply was there either. Finally somebody
>> wandered in, and Jim asked where everyone was. "Oh, they closed lab
>> supply, maybe 4 years ago?"
>>
>> Bell Labs had seen hard times since the Lucent split, and it was clear
>> it had not quite recovered, and Lab Supply was just one sign of it. I
>> think the saddest thing was seeing the visitor center, which I first
>> saw in 1976. In 1976, it was the seat of the Bell System Empire, and
>> it was huge. There was a map of the US with a light lit for every
>> switching office in the Bell Labs system. There was all kinds of Bell
>> Labs history in the visitor center museum.
>>
>> The museum had shrunk to a much smaller area, and felt like a closet.
>> The original transistor was still there in 2010, but little else.The
>> library was, similarly, changed: it was dark and empty, I was told.
>> Money was saved. At that time, Bell Labs felt large, strangely quiet,
>> and emptied of people. It made me think of post-sack Rome, ca. 600,
>> when its population was estimated to be 500. I have not been back
>> since 2011 so maybe things are very different. It would be nice if so.
>>
>> As part of this tour, Jim gave me 3 depraz mice. I took one, gutted
>> it, (sorry!), and filled its guts with a USB mouse innards, and gave
>> it back to Jim. He then had a Depraz USB mouse. jmk's mouse did not
>> have any lead in it, as John's did, however. The second I gave to
>> someone at Google who had worked at the labs back in the day. The
>> third mouse I gave to John, and he made it live again, which is cool.
>>
>> In spite of their reputation, I found Depraz mice hard to use. I have
>> gone through all kinds of mice, and am on an evoluent, and as far as
>> Depraz go, I guess "you had to be there". I don't recall if jmk used
>> his "usb depraz" or it ended up on a shelf. Sadly, I can no longer ask
>> him.
>>
>> I'll be interested to see what John thinks of the Depraz.
>>
>> ron
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 9:52 AM John Floren <john at jfloren.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > Ah, right. I opened the mouse because one of the encoders didn't seem
>> to be working (it worked fine again this morning, who knows...) and
>> discovered that there was something duct taped inside the plastic shell:
>> >
>> > http://jfloren.net/content/depraz/inside.jpg
>> >
>> > Peeling back the tape, I saw what I first took to be chunks of
>> flattened beer cans:
>> >
>> > http://jfloren.net/content/depraz/reveal.jpg
>> >
>> > A closer look showed that they were the wrappers which cover the corks
>> of wine bottles. Up into the 1980s, these were made out of lead, and by
>> flattening five of them, a previous owner of the mouse was able to add
>> quite a bit of extra weight to it:
>> >
>> > http://jfloren.net/content/depraz/wrapper.jpg
>> >
>> >
>> > john
>> >
>> > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> >
>> > On Friday, August 6th, 2021 at 9:34 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > > john, don't forget to mention the beer can
>> > >
>> > > On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 9:29 AM John Floren john at jfloren.net wrote:
>> > >
>> > > > I stuck an Arduino on it and with surprisingly little code I have
>> it acting like a 3-button USB mouse.
>> > > >
>> > > > The only problem is that the pointer doesn't move smoothly. It does
>> OK left-to-right, and can move down pretty well, but going up is a problem.
>> I think pushing the mouse forward tends to move the ball away from the
>> Y-axis wheel, and the old spring on the tensioner just doesn't have the
>> gumption to hold that heavy ball bearing in any more.
>> > > >
>> > > > john
>> > > >
>> > > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> > > >
>> > > > On Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 at 9:12 PM, ron minnich
>> rminnich at gmail.com wrote:
>> > > >
>> > > > > John, you can see that "stick a bird on it" -> "stick an arduino
>> on
>> > > > >
>> > > > > it" -> "stick a pi on it" has gone as you once predicted :-)
>> > > > >
>> > > > > On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 8:59 PM John Floren john at jfloren.net
>> wrote:
>> > > > >
>> > > > > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
>> > > > > >
>> > > > > > On Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 at 6:12 PM, Henry Bent
>> henry.r.bent at gmail.com wrote:
>> > > > > >
>> > > > > > > On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 at 20:52, John Floren john at jfloren.net
>> wrote:
>> > > > > > >
>> > > > > > > > Having just been given a Depraz mouse, I thought it would
>> be fun to get it working on my modern computer. Since the DE9 connector is
>> male rather than female as you usually see with serial mice, and given its
>> age, I speculate that it might have a custom protocol; in any rate,
>> plugging it into a USB-serial converter and and firing up picocom has given
>> me nothing.
>> > > > > > > >
>> > > > > > > > Does anyone have a copy of a manual for it, or more
>> information on how to interface with it? If I knew how it was wired and
>> what the protocol looked like, I expect I could make an adapter pretty
>> trivially using a microcontroller.
>> > > > > > >
>> > > > > > > This might be of some help?
>> > > > > > >
>> > > > > > >
>> https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/74403-whitechapel-mg-1-depraz-mouse-grey-pinout#post904391
>> > > > > > >
>> > > > > > > -Henry
>> > > > > >
>> > > > > > This looks great, thank you!
>> > > > > >
>> > > > > > john
>>
>
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