[rbanffy]

> I had never seen a mouse move as buttery-smooth as it did on the Amiga

I remember the contrast between a SPARCStation and an SGI O2 and how the O2 mouse was smoother than the Sun's. Same between Windows and Macs at the time.

Design priorities...

[spijdar]

This one is weird -- the problem with Suns is the mice they shipped used a really low baud rate, so they're basically "running at 20 FPS".

What's strange, is that SunOS, Solaris, and even NextStep all supported higher baud serial mice. If you look at the mouse driver on SunOS for example, you'll see the logic which loops over baud rates until it detects valid mouse data.

And Sun did ship a mouse with a higher polling rate/baud. One. The wired ball mouse for the SPARCstation Voyager.

NetBSD doesn't have the baud detection loop, so there, for this single mouse, you have to change the kernel to make it work: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/faq.html#voyager-mouse