I recently acquired through the place I work a mouse that looks like this. It appears as if this mouse was made in the early 80s before I was even born. I think it would be awesome to be able to use it.
Anyway, after some research it appears as if this mouse is a mini-din 7 mouse. PS/2 is mini-din 6. So I can’t directly plug one into the other.
I was looking at the pin layouts for each hoping I could just wire them up. But apparently they are different (PS/2 has bidirectional data pin and a clock that the mini-din 7 doesn’t have). Is there any way to connect this mini-din 7 mouse to a modern computer?
Here are some pictures. Sorry that my camera is messing up.
When I saw “mini-din 7 pin” my first thought was “They found an old SPARCstation mouse.” Well, I was pretty close if it’s really from a DECstation.
I don’t know that you’d ever be able to make a DEC mouse talk PS/2 or USB without a box of custom-built circuitry, but if you’re into hardware hacking, you ought to be able to take a standard optical mouse and transplant its innards and cable into the DEC mouse.
I remember those. The interface is not anything like a PS/2 interface, so unless you are into programming custom hardware, I think you will be out of luck.
Thanks guys. I have done some embedded programming and that’s technically what I get paid to do, but I don’t care enough to make a big project out of it. I may end up taking a modern mouse and taking the innards and placing it inside of this one to make it work that way, but that’s really the extent I was looking for here. Thanks for the help. I can maybe keep it as a collectors item thought.
It’s kind of funny. I work for a NASA contractor and they keep so much old crap. Stuff that hasn’t been in use for literally decades that they can’t apparently get NASA to commit to throw away and this happens to be one of them. Anyways, thanks again for the help.