The Power Mouse by ProHance: A Glimpse into the Future

As we take a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete, it's fascinating to explore the innovations of the past. The ProHance PowerMouse is one such device that showcases what can be achieved when technology pushes the boundaries of possibilities. This remarkable mouse was donated by Ryan, a viewer of LGR, and we're excited to delve into its features and history.

The ProHance PowerMouse: A $295 Kit Released in 1990

In 1990, ProHance Technologies released the PowerMouse as a $295 kit, which is astonishing considering it was available for purchase at one point for $180. This device was part of a trend where high-end technology was emerging, with the basic Microsoft mouse costing around $150 at that time. The ProHance PowerMouse stands out not only for its price but also for its 40-button design.

A 40-Button Marvel: Unparalleled Functionality

The ProHance PowerMouse boasts an unprecedented number of buttons, making it a standout in the industry. While other devices had multiple buttons, this particular device takes the cake with its impressive array of functions. The device's capabilities are not limited to simple mouse functionality; it comes with pre-programmed key definition tables that allow users to customize and swap out buttons with face plates tailored to specific programs or applications.

Applications: From Spreadsheets to Desktop Publishers

The ProHance PowerMouse was marketed as a versatile tool, designed to work seamlessly with various software applications. According to the sales pitch, this device was supposed to be particularly adept at handling computer-aided design (CAD) tasks, although an InfoWorld review from 1990 took a different stance. Regardless of its limitations, the ProHance PowerMouse represents a bold move by ProHance Technologies to cater to the evolving needs of users.

A Donation with a Message: Ryan's Gift to LGR

Ryan, a viewer of LGR, has donated this remarkable device, and we extend our gratitude for his generosity. The ProHance PowerMouse is now part of LGR's collection, serving as a testament to the innovative spirit of technology pioneers. We're thrilled to share this unique piece with our audience, offering a glimpse into the world of forgotten but fascinating hardware.

The Legacy of the ProHance PowerMouse

As we conclude our exploration of the ProHance PowerMouse, it becomes clear that this device represents more than just a relic of the past. It symbolizes the relentless pursuit of innovation and the willingness to challenge conventional boundaries. The ProHance PowerMouse may have started as a high-end kit released in 1990, but its impact on the world of technology is undeniable. As we continue to explore the realm of oddware, devices like this one remind us that even seemingly absurd ideas can shape the course of history.

The Future of Technology: What Can We Learn?

As we look back at the ProHance PowerMouse, it becomes apparent that this device was a harbinger of things to come. The concept of customization and adaptability in technology is nothing new, but devices like the ProHance PowerMouse pushed these ideas into the mainstream. Today, we're seeing similar trends emerge with the proliferation of modular devices, customizable hardware, and software that caters to individual needs.

The Power Mouse by ProHance: A Conversation Starter

In conclusion, the ProHance PowerMouse is a remarkable device that continues to fascinate audiences. Its 40 buttons, pre-programmed key definition tables, and ability to work seamlessly with various software applications make it an unparalleled marvel of technology. As we continue to explore the world of oddware, devices like this one remind us that innovation knows no bounds and that even seemingly absurd ideas can shape the course of history.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings and welcome to LGR Oddware,where we're taking a look at hardware and softwarethat is odd, forgotten and obsolete,like the Power Mouse by ProHanceThis is something that you getwhen you choose the future!And here we are! This is the ProHance PowerMouse,as I've already mentioned,and first, I also have to mention that this a donation from Ryan, who is a viewer of LGR.Thank you very much sir. What have you done?Anyway this, as I said, is what you getwhen you choose the future, apparently,and this particular version, you can kind of see with that little sticker in the top right that's been marked out,at one point this cost $180apparently was bought on clearance before that though this was actually a$295 kit, and it was released as such in 1990 by ProHance technologies based in Sunnyvale, CaliforniaBut then this was at a time when a two-button Microsoft mouse – just a basic mouse cost $150The whole big deal about this though is that it is a 40 button deviceYou see some different mouse and input devices today with a whole lot of buttonsBut this takes the cake as far as anything that I have in my collectionIt is absolutely absurd! So the whole elevator sales pitch I suppose for this back in the day was that it came with thesePre-Programmed key definition tables that you can apply to all these different buttons and then swap them out with face plates and whateverfor whatever program you needed it to: spreadsheets, word processors, desktop publishersComputer-aided design, anything with cad it's supposed to be really good with at least that was the ideaalthough Info World's review in 1990said it was \"clearly not a candidate for most users hard to hold, hard to maneuver, and awkward to control\"This was just the lowest-scoring thing they reviewed at that time, and the president of ProHanceKirk MacKenzie actually wrote in to them later and said they missed the whole pointand their users were always saying how much it improved their productivity, and far exceeded expectationsReally defensive there, but you know he's the president of the companyWhat is he supposed to say? They also made three and twelve and seventeen-button input devicesSome with a lot of buttons, some with track balls ontop – didn't really seem to matter because, by the mid-90s1995 at the latest, the Company was dissolved and ProHancewas picked up by a whole lot of other companies, at least the name was. This product has sort of faded from existencethe inside of this flap here is uhIt's pretty entertaining, and also just revealing, tooJust trying to sell you so much on all of these featuresIncredibly versatile! Look, it's a mouse, a numpad,a function pad, joystick, remote device, digitizing tablet. All these things and probably more: the Power Mouse!So much better than those nice keyboards. Just say no to keyboards! Use the Power Mouse, and yeahI guess I could maybe see some appeal if you didn't have a numpad on your laptop at the timebut uh you know just get an external numpad, why do you need this? I don't knowI also find this justLook at thisThe people that use this, alright, it unleashes your imagination. It's used by handicapped people, construction people, and SteppenwolfWhat a thing to lump it all together with, umYeah, the right group Steppenwolf!I guess you have to be \"born to be wild\" to use this? Actually was like1989/1990 when this packaging was made. I guess that was during like the John Kay & Steppenwolf eras?I don't know what their songs were at that pointYou'll also notice this little doohickey attached to it right there with a little crosshairThat doesn't actually come thisSo I guess they were just sort of saying hey if you want to add other stuff you couldBut then again, you could add that same kind of little crosshair to any mouse. This is just nothing specialYeah, let's open up the inside it is and so quiteneatly made little package you got to say yeah. Yeah inside you get the manual for the PowerMouse 100Reminds me of Powerman 10,000 or 9000, or whatever that band was –5000? I don't know so yeah, it's it's a manualThis is surprisingly detailed for as simple and easy as they say it is on the outside of the boxyou also get this little software package sleeveso inside of this is what we're gonna get as far asthe software to run it, and you need this because as I said, it is proprietary. It's not likejust generic mouse drivers, Microsoft compatible or anythingSo this is the 3.5\", 5 ½\" version and then it also comes with thisProHance AutoCAD PowerPak andThis is such a joke, an absolute jokeSo this is what made this one cost a hundred dollars more than the models without this. This right hereIs simply just a bunch of configs, like text files to tell it how to useThis mouse with AutoCAD, and the thing is you can set that up yourself. You don't even need this, so that's uselessThis little fold-out thingy here that says oh look at all these advantages and thingsWhile it does have a very handy reference for its pre-madeAutoCAD settings, it againis absolutely useless you can figure that out on your own, or just program stuff yourself. The only other thing that sets this apartand supposedly makes it worth that $100is this little faceplate. A little custom made piece of plastic,that worthless disc, and a little fold-out sheet is a hundred dollars apparently. I don't think so.But yeah, it does come with the idea ofYou know, custom face plateswhich is something that was done quite a bit with different, like, keyboard add-ons for instance during the'80s and into the '90s, and, maybe is still done today, I don't know.A lot of times it would just be an overlay like paperbut these are actually plastic, and clip on to the front of the PowerMouse itself.It also comes with the ball, which you have to installinto the bottom there, and we have a different serial port adapter hereso we have the nine-pin to 25-pin, depending on the type of serial if you're going to be plugging intoand then of course we have the mouse itselfAnd yeah, this is – it's not smallIt's not small at all, and it's got a lot of buttons:forty of themSo you have two mouse buttons one right here, one right herethese are customized buttons that you canuse for different functions and programs, and also setup, like program your own macros with the software that it comes with,and this is just like normal keyboard stuff here. Along with some function things like if you have to press F1 you press function F1Let's just go ahead and demonstrate that and I'll plug this in and see what you getFirst things first though, we've going to install the ballotherwise it's not going to work. So yeah that just goes right in the bottom of there, and yeah, pretty standard mouse stuffLet's get some software going! Okay, so I've got the ProHance ProMouse plugged in here to my wonderfulCompaq Presario 425, one of my favorite older computers,and yeah, the software is installed.Really, just this one disk is needed. The 5.25\" is just athing if you don't have 3.5\" inch drive, and the other disk as I mentioned before, I think, ispretty well useless if you don't have AutoCAD, so yeahLet me just show you how to use this thing. So you can either have it configureThis to just set itself up automatically with autoexec.bat and stuffbut I don't want to do that because I have other things on here. I'm not going to be using this frequentlyso go over to the ProHance the folder and you'll be able to see here some different things on screen, so we havea test program, \"power.com\", which is the most basic version of this driver, \"powered\", just an editor,\"powersel\" is a selector program, and a couple of others for editing, and help for other applicationsthat I'm not even going to be using, so we're just going to load the \"powersel\" here andYeah, that should just put it right into its default configurationWhich as it is here, this is just sort of generalized setup, which makes the up-down left-right of the mouse movementequate to what the arrow keys would do since I actually have doskey enabled. So that's bringing up my previously used commandsAnd that's that's all it does here, however if we bring up the press the menu buttonon The PowerMouse itself, it lets youchoose from all of these other key definition tablesAnd this really is the key to making this thing work with other applications, at least in theoryso if I were to move it over intomouse mode let me just try edit here for instanceOkay, yeah, so it is –Edit is treating this just like as a normal mouse so I canYeah, I can navigate the readme file that came with PowerMouse and select and click and like do thingsThat I normally could with any other mouseWhat makes this thing supposedly special though right is the fact that it has all of these other buttonsSo what the heck do they do? Well of course we got the numpad, which is just literally a numpad. It's the same as thisIn fact anything that you can do in here is the same as what you can do on a keyboardIt's supposed to be more convenient over here and I'm not convincedand let me show you why. So we're going to go into \"powersel\" here and load the 123definition file table, whateverAnd if I go over here into Lotus 1-2-3, which is version 2.2 that I have on hereIt was contemporary at the time this was released more or lessWe'll see that I am actually able tomove it around, and really it's still doing this this program doesn't have mouse support, so it's justgiving you pseudo-mouse support by the arrow key movementand yes, it does squeakAnd also it makes this really horrible noise when you go up against the edges of the tablesThat's pretty bad. So, but yeah, that's that's you're gonna get that sort of by pressing down the arrow keysit's just this pulls so much quicker and um yeah, I mean you can do Lotus 1-2-3 thingies andthat's cool. It's like already. I've got a numpad right here. I can just change it on the flyOh my God. Like, it's so useful and fastNot really. I for one it is super super super sensitive and yes, you can turn that down. This is onI think the 200 DPI setting right now, so it's insanely sensitive. Which is why I'm getting that soundbut even if you turn it down, it's still just notIt doesn't feel right because this isn't a mouse cursorThis is literally this .This right here feel good, and precise like I know what I'm doingI will at least show you that, like, there's some of these other things that are pretty cool, like you can insert some rows right here,or columns like this, or you can adjust the width on the fly. I mean that'shandy in a pinch, but let me try something else, so we're going to go over into\"prohance\" once againAnd we're going to go into the WordPerfect thinghopefully it'll have thatOkay, and I opened up the power editor nowand so this you can actually see what it is doing these are all of the functions that it hasmapped out to the ProMouseso this really is just like a key mapper like you would see in an emulator orAny other thing that has a key mapper in any program ever. So yeah, you can see thatIt's got all of the stuff in normal mode just mapped to the numpad and otherSort of select functions and whatnot that you would see in WordPerfectIt's just that there's so many things that you have to remember on top of what you already have to rememberand you have the little overlay that goes on there, and it's got the basic one on here right now. It says copy, movesome erase and whatnot, but those change with every time you press function or user or shift or control or any of thoseand this manual only helps so much because this is a very generalized thing, like for instance this right here is aselection of stuff for word processing andThis will give you a reference, but this isn't the same for every word processor in fact title becomes page break, window becomes windowColumn becomes tab-set, width becomes margins. I mean some of them makes sense some of them don'tBut yeah, WordPerfect right hereYeahAnd, umm, sureCopy that. Yeah, I can copy things. It's great.I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing at allSo sure, I guess if you got used to this and totally re-learned your entire workflowmaybe this would be easier, but I don't know for two reasons. I don't think this makes any friggin' sense just because thisEverything is clearly laid out. It's a keyboard, man. It's not that hard. Especially for keyboard programsIt's useful if you are recording Macros whichI don't know any for these programs, so I haven't done that butAgain, a lot of these programs have macros built into them, and you can just use them through a keyboard combinationor there's extra software that you can get to just do a macro and make themfor any program that doesn't have them. So you can just have a memory resident thing like the one that it's using right hereAnd have macros. The other really big reason that I don't understand anything about this is because look at these friggin' tiny little keysthey're so smalland just bsolutely, not enjoyable to usethey also take a lot of pressure to press down. This whole thing is just clumber... clumber? Clumbersome?Clumby? It clumby and cumbersome, and it doesn't feel right when it moves it squeaks. It's heavy, ughhhThe other big area that this seriously fails isin one of its big selling points using PowerMouse as a mouse, the most versatile mouse on the market? Okay...The thing is it's not compatible with anything except its own silly driversSo like if something is looking for a very basic mouse input on comm oneIt will probably maybe workBut if it's like so many other things and it's looking for a Microsoft compatible mouseIt's not going to work at all. So I have the mouse definitionYou know, whatever. It's on right nowSo say if I try to load something like SimCity 2000, which is going to look for a Microsoft compatible mouseIt will not do it. You can try to load, like a Microsoft compatible mouse driverLike \"mouse.com\" or executable whatever and it's not going to do anything eitherit's just going to confuse it and overload the memory. It screws things up, and it just runs into all sorts of problemsI have been able to run them simultaneously like I have like a regularJust PS/2 compatible mouse plugged in that'll work in some casesyou can get both drivers to load at the same time, but again you start to run out of memory, andlike conventional memoryOr like if I go into Windows 3.1 hereYou just don't have a mouseat all. There's just no cursor, it completely disables it. You might think, oh wellMaybe there's a driver for this, in fact a manual even mentions that you can install a mousedriver for WindowsBut it's not on this disk. I've checked all the disks. There are no mouse drivers whatsoever for Windows 3Maybe they were from Windows 2 or something? I don't know. But this thing came out in 1990and this particular disc is from 1991, so I would think there would be Windows 3 drivers in herebut nope there are not. So it straight up does not work with Windows even though it has a Windows presetIt supposedly maps like this right here to the clock, this right here to the task summary, this right here to tabWindow selection, close window. That would be fineIf it actually worked with Windows, but you try to press any of those in Windows 3, even in this modeIt'll just beep at you a whole lot, and then eventually crash Windows!Maybe there's one last saving grace of this and that might be, I don't know with games and doing absurd stuff that waybut noIt doesn't do that either. At least for the games that I would want to try it with, just you know because silly reasonsLike doom here for instance okay, you got the menu because again. It's treating the mouse like a keyboardSo you would think that would work fine for the game and it does work for thisLike you can basically just use it as a mousebut that's doing literally nothing different than you couldn't already do with just a normal mouseI thought about maybe trying to map it to the numpadSo that at least that would be something kind of interesting like oh, I can move around by pressing these little buttonsbut no, Doom doesn't recognize any of these, or any of these. It recognizes the two mouse buttons and thisEven when I put it totally over into keyboard mode, it does this so literally this is no different than just runninga regular mouse in DoomAgain just to sort of illustrate my point here, you can go into Commander Keen and hit use keyboard. It's like okaywell, I want to change that to that and you know that to that which nope then this yet againdoesn't work none of these recognized whatsoever either, and in fact you'd think since the mouse is mapped to arrow keysthat that would work, but nope it doesn't work at all, and now no longer treats it as a keyboard andnow those buttons don't workWell, that's the ProHance ProMouse. This thing is absolutely boring. You would think for a device with 40 buttons on thereyou'd have some sort of cool possibilitiesNo, just stick to a keyboard and a normal mouse, you'll be fineWhat a silly thing. A silly thing indeed, and very much odd. Which is whyI just talked about it, and I hope you enjoyed this video on this thing and if you did then perhapsyou'd like to see some of other LGR Oddware episodes, as well as all sorts of other kinds of videos that I do everysingle week every Monday and Friday here on LGRAnd, as always, thank you very much for watching!\n"