X11 & Spaceball, No Alex there are other spaceball lovers too

[Allen R. Lorenz]

To all spaceball users...

The history of the spaceball, and developer is quite easy find out about
by googling.. 

http://www.spatialfreedom.com/pages/content.asp?pid=1

There are several models.  The most 2003a/b  are basically the same
consisting of nine buttons.  8 on top with one on the ball.  You will
usually find this listed from "Spaceball Technologies, or "A4360A" from
Hewlett Packard (HP).  The 2003c model, I have only found released from
IBM 6094-030. This model different from 2003a/b in it did not have a
ninth button on the ball, and did not require an external power
supply.  

The 3003 spaceball I have is from "Spacetec IMC".  I believe there is at
least an hp version of this, and may ibm.  This model only has two
buttons.

The 4000 model has twelve button (1-9) and (a-c).  I believe there are a
couple of version of this two.  While all previous models where serial
port, I think this also had a early usb version.

There is a 5000 model usb and 10s of variants....

My fascination with spaceball began the tv show VR5, which the main
heroine had one on here computer.  May years later I found them on ebay
and bought several models.  Also my interest in Linux ( Redhat 7.2/8) at
the time, cause be to dive guts of both the kernel drivers, and
monolithic X at the time.... I also submitted several patches for to
developers that I never heard back from.  If any would like copies of my
old email/and patches go ahead and email me directly.  By modifying
inputattach, and the spaceball driver  I was able to all models at that
time ( 2003b, 2003c, 3003, 4000 ) to work under linux (jstest), and was
able to get X and glut3.7 working to.  On my project list for this
summer will be make sure they all work with the present X / flavor of
glut...

                        Allen.