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.
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 definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
neutered
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.
Man, that’s a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about that until I saw this post!
I wouldn’t say I ‘stole’ them necessarily. But me and my buddies did used to take them out and hide them near the desks as a prank.
We had to flip the mouses around at the end of every computer class so the teacher could check all the mouse balls were still there.
Yup. I was a nerd who got to go inside and boot up the computers and set them back from what the kids had done the day before every morning. Warning sounds with SNL skits were popular at one point, as was messing with the icons.
It was instead of standing outside in the cold wet concrete courtyard for 20 minutes before the first bell.
First job was turning the mouses back over (the were left balls up at the end of each class).
Out go to prank was a shut down bat file, disguised as GTA.exe. We used to put that in a shared folder and waited for other students to shut down their computers.
Ha, these were early Macs (right at the launch of System 7) there was only a few kids with these at home so I had a pretty good idea who was brining in the icons and sound files (aiff if I recall correctly). We had one at my home too btw. They were interesting computers but besides shareware and a couple game companies, they were abysmal for games. We did get a copy of Warcraft 1 and could play it over 14.4k directly dialed to the other computer lines with PC users.
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.
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.
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.
i was on the other side… i’d spend the first five minutes scraping all the finger shit off of the rollers every day.
I forgot all about scraping those little rollers with my fingernail! It was strangely satisfying.
and super gross when you think about it…
The gunk is just compacted dust from the desk surfaces.
Perhaps a bit gross, but it’s mostly stuff you’re breathing in daily, just now visible due to being compacted.
Super gross to me would imply something like bodily fluids or other biohazard.
Am I missing something?
The majority of dust particles on the surface of your desk is dead human skin cells. That’s the part you’re missing.
So touching dead skin cells with my skin is supposed to be a biohazard?
First time I hear that.
I guess I also shouldn’t shake hands anymore.
i think you’re missing the part where a lot of that gunk is exactly bodily fluids and other biohazards lol
How so? I’m not coughing or spitting on the desk.
Dead skin cells, sure, but that’s not a biohazard.
you’re gonna be REALLY grossed out when you find out what’s on your toothbrush…
That’s why I don’t keep my brushes in the same room as my toilet.
i glued the bottom on hundreds of mice.
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!
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…
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!
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.
Kind of a dick move.
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
No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
The best was when you got a “full peel” from a really dirty wheel without it breaking into pieces.
Doing God’s work!
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.
No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.
This thread makes me wonder if there will always be a mischief factor. Even if robots do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will people still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
Even if
robotshumans do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, willpeoplecats still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
Absolutely. If humans disappeared for two months every object in the world would be on the floor. Then cats, having fulfilled their mission, would suddenly vanish in a puff of loose hair.
Until reading this, I had forgotten that mouse balls were even a thing.
