Museum DataArt. The mouse manipulator of graphic information

The DataArt Museum has existed for 10 years, you could see some exhibits in our blog in the form of posters . We continue to expand the collection and have begun preparing a full-fledged exposition on the history of IT. In parallel, we will regularly publish materials on individual exhibits of the museum. In this article, we present Soviet mice. They are “manipulators of graphic information”.

The first mice in the USSR were shipped with imported personal computers in the 1980s. These are mainly the three-key devices Genius and IBM and the futuristic round trackballs Digital. As computers became smaller and spread outside laboratories, the need for convenient means of entering information became apparent.

In the DataArt collection, imported mice, of course,
In the article in the third issue of the journal "Microprocessor Tools and Systems" for 1986, devoted to the development trends of Soviet PCs and describing the proposed innovations in sufficient detail, the mouse mouse does not appear. But two years later, the same magazine published an entire article about the device of the mouse, the author of which explains how convenient and indispensable this device is.

Obviously, there were not enough mice, and tasks that were solved, including on Soviet machines, required convenient manipulators. In 1989, Nail Malakhov and Alexander Pilyar, employees of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, create their own schemes, largely repeating the experience of foreign engineers. The fact is that there are already a lot of computers such as the IBM PC and Pravets-16, EU-1840 at their institute, but the standard equipment does not provide any input devices other than a keyboard. At the same time, many standard programs (Norton, Lotus, Orcad) already allow the use of a mouse or “coordinate ball”.

Malakhov and Pilar write that such devices are indispensable when working with graphic information: drawings and diagrams, including the layout of printed circuit boards. Without going into technical analysis, we note that the development was carried out so that the Microsoft MSMOUSE.SYS driver could be used.

A little later, the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries filed an application for the invention of a "mouse" graphic information manipulator . The application was submitted by Oleg and Nina Yanushkevichi, representing the P / G G-4805 enterprise. As we know, the NGO “Applied Mechanics” was hidden under the number of the “mailbox”. M. F. Reshetneva in Zheleznogorsk - now it is JSC "Information Satellite Systems".



Our collection contains several well-known Soviet mice UVK-1 (Coordinate input device), which, as indicated in the instructions, "were intended to expand the consumer properties" of household computers "Electronics BK0010 and BK0010-01."



It is noteworthy that these mice were produced under the “Martian” trademark at the Mars specialization in space navigation, in particular, experts from the experimental design bureau provided automated soft landing for the Buran orbiter in 1988.



It is very likely that production was established just on the basis of the very Zheleznogorsk patent of the Yanushkevichs, since both enterprises worked in the same industry, for which difficult times had already come. The chronology of the release of series models also speaks in favor of this version: BK0011 was released already at the end of 1989, but this model was not mentioned in the first instructions to UVK-1.

About another classic Soviet model of manipulators of graphic information - EU-1841. A002 - a little less is known.



This serious mouse, which is called either a "bun" (most likely, this does not apply to a particular model, but to the principle - the device is based on a metal ball), then a "rat" (due to its size), was part of the EU-1841 workstation.



We could not find other accurate information about the device. Apparently, they began to produce them together with the PC itself in 1987 in Minsk, we did not find a separate patent for this mouse. Apparently, the device or, as stated in the technical description “desktop device”, was part of the general copyright application for the EU-1841.

It turns out that the Soviet mice appeared in 1987 together with the EU-1841 PC, were part of the factory supply and did not exist separately. At the same time, there were already quite a few home computers by that time. Scientists and designers from industries in which specialists were well acquainted with coordinate devices came to the aid of users. Nuclear physicists and spacecraft makers made designs for mice for their own needs and, probably, to replenish college budgets.