Joystick

A joystick is a computer peripheral consisting of a hand held stick that pivots about one end and transmits its angle in two or three dimensions to a computer. Most joysticks are two-dimensional, they have two axes of movement, just like a mouse[?], but three-dimensional joysticks do exist.

Joysticks are often used to control games, and usually have one or more push-buttons whose state can also be read by the computer. Most I/O interface cards for PCs have a joystick (game control) port.

Technical details

An analog joystick is a joystick which has continuous states, i.e. returns an angle measure of the movement in any direction in the plane or the space (usually utilizing potentiometers) and a digital joystick gives only on/off signals for four different directions, and mechanically possible combinations (such as up-right, down-left e.t.c.).

Additionally joysticks often have one or more fire buttons, used to trigger some kind of action. These are digital.

History

The first joystick was probably invented around 1944 in Nazi Germany. The device was developed for targetting the glide bomb Henschel Hs 293 against ship targets. Here, the joystick was used by an operator to steer the missile towards it's target by radio control. This joystick was a totally analog device since it was not connected to a computer, but according to the above definition of a digital joystick, it was digital.

This invention was picked up by someone in the team of scientist assembled at the Heeresversuchsanstalt in Peenemünde. Here a part of the team on the German rocket program was developing the Wasserfall rocket[?], a successor to the V-2 rocket, the first ground-to-air missile intended for shooting down enemy aircraft.

(In these times the device was not associated with any kind of joy so it was simply called control stick.)

See Also:

• Gravis Gamepad
• Game controller

Based on a FOLDOC entry