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that term, and a Hopfield network before John Hopfield invented that concept, and
a self-tracker before Gary Bishop came up with visual odometry. It did this all with
only 16 pixels, so it was simple, rather than powerful or general. The chip was at the
LSI level of complexity, but was a teaching vehicle and popular example for methods
of digital VLSI system design that it embodied.
I enjoyed lecturing on this development at universities all around the world, and
I still have my viewgraphs, printed on the world's first color laser printer (Gary
Starkweather's “Puffin”) in 1981, in case anyone would like to hear a rerun.
Acknowledgments
I recall fondly the help of a great many people at PARC during the evolution
of the ideas in the optical mouse, but I would like to single out just a few. Carlo Séquin taught me
about how silicon detects light, giving me the basis to build on. Dan Ingalls provided ideas about
two-dimensional tracking. Chuck Thacker reviewed the first optical mouse chip layout and found
two errors that would have killed it. Martin Haeberli volunteered to do the second-generation layout,
and took over the effort as I was preparing to leave PARC to lead a speech recognition group at
Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. Lynn Conway, Bert Sutherland, and George Pake provided the
supportive environment that allowed such ideas to take root.
References
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