The Atari 800
Hawley Mouse


 




        An engineer named Rich Pasco came over from Xerox PARC to Atari's Home Computer Division (HCD).     While working at Atari he noticed something missing which he had become quite used to over at Xerox.    A "Mouse".   Xerox was the developer of the first GUI (Graphics User Interface) and also the first developer of the "Mouse" pointing device.   The Xerox Altos and Star 8010 utilitized desktop metaphors, point & click and all the other features we have come to know and use today from companies such as Apple with its Finder, Digital Research with its GEM for  Atari ST's as well as PC's, GUI's on Unix & Linux and Microsoft with its Windows.
 
 

        Wanting to work in a more familiar and friendly user interface environment on the Atari home computers, Rich Pasco went to Hawley Systems, a maker of computer mice.  He purchased a version of their mouse that would interface with the Atari 800 front controller ports.   After writing a screen driver, he was able to move his mouse pointer all over the screen to work in almost any programming language to do point and click functions.
 
 


            After working with the mouse and proving its effectiveness, Rich Pasco approached the marketing department with the mouse and his driver in hopes of persuading them to include a mouse with every Atari 800 sold (Rich's compact driver could've easily have been integrated into the Atari OS ROM board or loaded via disk or cassette).   Marketing tried to work with the mouse, but being used to playing with joysticks, this strange foreign device was too difficult for them to understand and use so they rejected his idea.   Many talented and ingenious engineers such as Rich created internal devices or interfaced existing components to Atari systems within Atari and approached marketing with these ideas and were rejected, a true shame in hindsight...   but it has to be remembered that at companies such as Atari, they were venturing into unknown and uncharted territory in both design and marketing, so each idea was a gamble and many times the luck of the dice rolled a craps.
 



 
 

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