Dunno what made me think of this just now. When I worked for IT in a school district way back in the 90s, a librarian told me she kept a supply of mouse balls in her desk because kids would steal them out of the school computers. What I remember about those balls was they picked up dust and crud off surfaces. Pretty soon optical mice came along and they were history.
Nope. Way back in the day turning the brightness on a monitor completely down was the big prank. I do remember cleaning my mices balls and I did not relish that. When optical mouse came down in price I bought one for every family member.
Yep. We took them out because we thought they would bounce (they did not). But they were hard AF so we’d just throw them at each other during recess.
I would just open them up and tape over one of the little wheels inside, then put the ball back in.
You can do the same thing with an optical mouse.
https://images6.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED3/515b47490eeda.jpeg
When I worked for a big IT consultant, the internal marketing department (why does that exist?) was tasked with promoting a new touch device. They had the genius idea of making stickers with “The mouse is dead” and a product link. Early one morning, they went around to every desk and put these stickers over the mouse lasers.
It took about 30 minutes for everyone to figure out why every mouse in the building had stopped working. There was urgent work that had to be done. People were furious.
That’s an impressive display of marketing prowess. You’ll never forget it, regardless of how stupid it was.
Yeap, I was one of those students, they arw super fun to just throw along the floor as they had a metal core, was heavy and went on and on forever
i glued the bottom on hundreds of mice.
Kind of a dick move.
Can’t believe I had to scroll this far to find this. Looks like my school and yours were the only two in the world where it occurred to anyone that you can just superglue the door shut to stop the little shits from thieving them.
Never heard of that - does it mean gluing the ball in place or what? Also why (the fuck) would you?
My school used to actually glue them, as in glue the part you would remove to get access to the ball. So the mouse still worked, until enough gunk got in there that it didn’t any more, then someone has a fun time trying to find the right solvent to dissolve the glue without killing the mouse.
Ahh, ok now we’re getting into supervillain territory!
one of my first gigs was working for a school district. just gluing the little door closed so kids couldnt steal the ball.
My god, the lint build-up!
I assume that he’s keeping people from opening the mice to steal the ball. Would also make it hard to clean the rollers, though…
I actually don’t remember any of my school computers having ball mice. They all only got their computers in the late 90’s and had optical mice by then.
But I can imagine; my high school was savage.
Dunno if was my parents or genetics or what, but as a kid I never had the urge to do stuff like that. My impulse was make up funny stuff. The idea of breaking or ruining something seemed bad to me. So if I had gone to school in the age of computer mice I would have been pissed off if some kid disabled the mouse. It didn’t bother me when my friend tricked the voice synthesizer at the science center to repeat “Fuck you, fuck you…” but I would have called him an asshole if he poured a drink into the keyboard.
I definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
neutered
I’m bad about keeping old devices around. I have my first TNT graphics card, a Soundblaster, and several VGA cords. I do NOT have any mice around with balls. Gone the minute optical came on the scene, what an annoyance they could be.
A few years ago my mouse died on me and I had to dig in my tech box for a usable spare… Found a ball mouse and used it a total of five seconds before I tossed it (and the rest of them I had) and went out and bought a cheap optical instead lol
It’s like so many things. We were okay with what we had until something came along to vastly improve it. Internet and computer speeds, storage sizes, graphics. We did seem to forget how having good gameplay is important though in some modern games, got distracted by the eye candy.
Yea, eff those damn balls, and I had some nice mice back then.
I recently cleaned up several large boxes of cables, parts, etc. Found a track ball, but not a single ball mouse in there.
No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
Doing God’s work!
The best was when you got a “full peel” from a really dirty wheel without it breaking into pieces.
No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.
Yep was one of these kids… From the very same period, removing 10base2 BNC terminators was also a fun thing to do. Both had the effect to infuriate the computer science teacher…
Thanks for the collection of all this…
(later it was the deadly loop on network hubs and tcpkill… all this is impossible now)
We didn’t steal the balls, but where computers were back to back we’d swap the mice over. Cue much confusion for the next class when the pointer seemed to move on it’s own. Fun times.
At one of my jobs a guy ran the speaker wires from the adjoining cubicle in and out of his own computer so he could mix things into the other guy’s audio, mostly music and talk radio, at very low volume so it sounded like random stray signals. Took the guy like a month to figure out what was going on.
Worked in an office where everyone had a Macbook and wireless mouse. Getting in early and swapping some of the mice around was SOP.
Yes, yes I do remember doing that. Not just at school. Use to do it to dad. When he was being annoying sometimes.
The brief era? It was over a decade of people stealing mouse balls! And once optical mice started showing up people would steal the entire mouse because they were new and cool!
Just my own perspective lol. I was an old-school programmer before the web era, when computers were in a computer room and we used “terminals” that were just monitors with keyboards. I only had a PC and ball mouse for like 5 years before I got an optical mouse.
