Ted Selker [1] is the amazing guy who invented and refined the Trackpoint [2] or "Joy Button" as he called it (but IBM refused to call it). He put years of research and development into the product, and I'm happy he's finally written up and published the story. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Selker

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

[3] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxto...

I'm glad for the chance to share some of the stories he's told me verbally over the years, some of which I wrote up about a year ago, and I will update with links to more fascinating information about his work. [4]

[4] http://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1o26fb/old_school_thin...

Ted is one of my favorite successful mad scientist inventor heroes, who's created many amazing ideas, and followed through to make them practical products! He's in the same league as Will Wright [5], Trurl and Klapaucius [6], Dr. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. [7], and Rick and Morty [8].

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_%28game_designer%29

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Brown

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_and_Morty

In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. `

He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product.

He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from.

IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks.

The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem.

The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop.

He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area.

So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved.

The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen.

They did lots of user studies and took lots of measurements and performed lots of experiments to determine the best parameters for the pressure-to-speed transfer function, and finally came up with one that was measurably good enough to make IBM happy and ship in products.

So after pooh-pooh-ing the name "Joy Button", IBM finally settled on and trademarked the name "Trackpoint." But one concession they made, was when they published a two page ad spread in Time Magazine with a close-up of the trackpoint, above the slogan "So hot, we had to make it red!"

Another crazy but brilliant innovation he developed was the Thinkpad 755CV [9] that you could remove the back of the LCD screen and lay it down on an overhead projector to project the video! Nobody probably remembers overhead projectors any more, but they were very popular at the time, and that feature could save you a lot of money, and you never had to reboot it three times just to get the video on the projector, like with modern laptops!

[9] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:755CV

He also made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO hot red trackpoints on the keyboard, which invitingly resembled a pair of nipples. It was very popular with everyone he tested it on, but unfortunately OS/2 had no idea how to cope with two pointing devices, so there wasn't much use for it, besides being a wonderful ice breaker at parties.

I don't know if his lab is the one that invented the butterfly keyboard, but it was another in a long line of wonderful innovative ideas that were coming out of IBM's research labs and showing up in the Thinkpad at the time.

I learned about this stuff from the talks and demos he gave at his NPUC - New Paradigms for Using Computers [10] workshop that he produced at IBM Alameda Research Labs. [11] -- it was a really great free workshop, including free lunch, with people like Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy!

[10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw

Ted Selker, not Edwin Selker, explains the theory and story behind the Trackpoint. [12]

[12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6guBllqPPY?t=0s

Computer Human Interface Technology IBM ARC - 8_95. [13]

[13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJbjmZaAI4

1995 IBM NPUC Augment and Bootstrap Institute (July 27, 1995), with Ashok Chandra (IBM), Ted Selker (IBM), Marvin Minsky (MIT), Terry Winnograd (Stanford), Henry Lieberman (MIT), David Kelly (IDEO) , Douglass Engelbart (Bootstrap Institute), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), James Gosling (Sun), Marc Davis (Interval Research), Ramana Rao (Xerox PARC), Steve Mann, Thad Starner (MIT). [14]

[14] http://archive.org/details/XD1932_95IBM_NPUC_AugBootstrapIns...

NPUC '94 Tape 1A Window Dub. [15]

[15] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtUGnhVJsh8

NPUC '97 Highlights #1. [16]

[16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSOmRK_PTqM

NPUC '97 Highlights #2. [17]

[17] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC3SPFfKQMM

NPUC 1997 Part of Ted's Talk From Compilation 2. [18]

[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AB0yqxGEw

NPCU talks by Don Hopkins and Don Norman, discussing how well intentioned user interface designs can unintentionally enable users to easily destroy cities and cause nuclear meltdowns. [19]

[19] http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/NPUCHopkinsNorman.mov

How We Create Power Supply _ From Compilation 1 [20], in which Ted Selker explains why and how his group designed new kinds of power supplies, and focuses on their design approach of doing lots of competing designs at once and comparing them.

[20] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dApu7r1WxNk

Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!

He's a brilliant inventor, and a really nice guy, who apparently always carries around a big bag of spare Joy Buttons in case anybody needs one.