Derailleur gears a detent or ratchet mechanism which stops the gear lever, and hence the cable and the derailleur, after moving a specific distance with each press or pull. Indexed shifters require re-calibration when cables stretch and parts get damaged or swapped. On racing bicycles, 10-gear rear cassettes appeared in 2000, and 11-gear cassettes appeared in 2009. Most current mountain bicycles have either. Many modern, high-end mountain bikes have begun using entirely one chain ring drivetrains, with the industry constantly pushing the number of rear cogs up and up, as shown by SRAM's Eagle groupsets (1 by 12) and Rotor's recent 1
Derailleur gears cable-operated parallelogram rear derailleurs. In 1964, Suntour invented the "slant-parallelogram" rear derailleur, which let the jockey pulley maintain a more constant distance from the different sized sprockets, resulting in easier shifting. Once the patents expired, other manufacturers adopted this design, at least for their better models, and the "slant parallelogram" remains the current rear derailleur pattern. Before the 1990s many manufacturers made derailleurs, including Simplex, Huret, Galli, Mavic, Gipiemme, Zeus, Suntour, and Shimano. However, the successful introduction and promotion of indexed shifting by Shimano in 1985 required a compatible system of shift levers, derailleur, sprockets, chainrings, chain, shift cable, and