Using bowling balls as tracker Balls - CERN Bulletin

The bowling balls - CERN Bulletin

This will be of interest to youngsters as a history lesson and it will be the recollection of a distant memory for us old grey hairs. It's a great example as to how some of the technology developed, back in the 60's, in the days when a mouse was simply a) an irritating rodent that ate your lunch, b) something for biologists and chemists to experiment on, or c) a boon companion for lonely geeks who spent too many long winter nights in the science lab.

40 years ago, the web, Wikipedia and Google did not exist. Communications were minimal and this meant that the sharing of information was very slow, unreliable and based on published papers. It was much more difficult to know what everyone was working on and whether other people in other parts of the world, or even in the same laboratory, were facing the same problems or developing the same tools or solutions as you.

At that time, Bent Stumpe was an electronics engineer, newly recruited to work on developments for the SPS Central Control room. One of the things his supervisor asked him to build as soon as possible was a device to control a pointer on a screen, also called a tracker ball.

The heart of the device was the 'ball' that the user would move his hand over, while the cursor followed the corresponding movements on the screen. “We needed very round, well balanced and smoothly moving balls and after much thought and discussion, we thought that bowling balls best met these requirements”, recollects Bent Stumpe.

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