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While I <s>procrastinate</s> allow my blogposts and essays about my SF trip to soak in my brain, I'm kinda in the mood to do a classic nerdposting thread – and today I'm kinda curious about my mouse. This is the Logitech G602, I like it so much that I bought and own 3 of them https://t.co/9XCHDOLbQN
I've been finding that it's often most interesting to start with "so who are the people who made this" – and in this case, it turns out that Logitech was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland. These are Daniel Borel (Swiss), Pierluigi Zappacosta (Italian) and Giacomo Marini (Italian) https://t.co/IwYC4LsknG
Borel & Zappacosta became friends doing CS grad at Stanford, & developed an early word-processing system for Swiss company Bobst. Bobst makes... labels? They "supply machinery and services to the packaging industry". So much of the world economy is made of businesses like these https://t.co/FRYkvsmxdU
I'm also reminded of how the Sony founders were making rice cookers before they made transistor radios, and how Alfred Dunhill was making saddles before he made cigarettes. Find people you can work with and just make stuff together, anything https://t.co/lrX3TeRtVT
⚡️ was cheap in post-WW2 🇯🇵, since supply exceeded demand now the war machine was offline. Did this incentivize the R&D of electronics?🤔 While working on 📻 repairs, Masaru also made a failed rice cooker – it either overcooked or undercooked the rice, and never went to market. https://t.co/rqMxJbv7DW
At this point, ~1980, the three friends were working as consultants in publishing-related software dev. And...they get a four-month contract from Ricoh (Japanese company) to do a feasibility on developing a graphical editor. Funding secured!! (How??) Idk, time to start a company https://t.co/IVcq4EDRpr
So this is fun – while lots of American tech companies seem to start in garages, Logitech started on a Swiss farm! I can't figure out the exact farm, but I know that it was in Apples, Vaud. Seems like a lovely, scenic place and I bet the weather is lovely https://t.co/3C7Oy45h19
Logitech does then have a US chapter to its story – they set up at 165 University Ave in Palo Alto, which later subsequently housed Google and PayPal. Some call it The Lucky Office, and there a bunch of articles written about it https://t.co/CX0uEWXRdE https://t.co/PNRAxOvahv
Logitech (they wanted to call it Softech, because of their software background, but it was taken, so they used the French word for software: logiciel) was busy making software when they NOTICED that computer mice were becoming a thing. In 1982, they made the P4 Mouse https://t.co/WJS8YPWFFw
"Logitech has sold more keyboards and mice over its 36-year-history than any other company" – Quartz roughly: 1985: 1st mouse sold 1996: 100,000,000 mice 2003: 500,000,000 mice 2008: 1,000,000,000 mice Logitech's site today says "almost two billion" https://t.co/fKGWEVBqiW
Lol at this 2008 @WIRED article heralding the death of the computer mouse, screenshots taken with my Logitech G602 https://t.co/cEMVWdKMFF https://t.co/JuRmEI0T5Y
I love when people respond to my threads by making threads in turn!! Here’s a thread on the history of the computer mouse https://t.co/tOifOJ249h
@visakanv Here you go https://t.co/TtAO8jAJaZ
Douglas Engelbart was a visionary computer scientist and technologist commonly known for the computer mouse, though his most significant contributions were more philosophical (the introduction of the concept of collective intelligence) https://t.co/Lk1zC6Wu4g
