• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      15·
      16 days ago

      I was working in a facility with about 400 desktops when we made the move to laser mice. I remember it fondly. Cleaning was worse than the theft, but both were obnoxious.

      • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
        14·
        15 days ago

        Oh god we were such shits in junior high. Throwing them was great fun because they hurt like hell. I witnessed a kid throw one out a window and crack the shit out of a teacher’s windshield. Why they never just put short flathead screws in I’ll never know, that would be my solution.

        You got me nostalgic thinking of junior high. If there was a hell I’d never redeem myself through good deeds. We’d pack bags full of lunch food and drop them 4 floors down the stairwell where they would explode spectacularly. We got our milk in bags, so we would strategically place them around the school to rot. They got so swollen it was outrageous. When they popped it was like a grenade of putrid stink, about two or three weeks later. If you wanted one to pop faster you could hide it behind a radiator. Projectiles made of paper clips that would legit fuck you up when fired from rubber bands the right way. You could also bite the corner off the milk bag and throw it like a grenade. Oh man and you could put like a carrot or mashed potatoes or beans into a corner of the milk bag and smash a fist on top to shotgun it everywhere. Milk bags were versatile.

        I was a piece of shit, but this was what I got up to while being severely bullied, there were worse kids.

      • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world
        24·
        15 days ago

        Back in the day we would prank each other by flipping the 120\240 switch on each other’s computers so that they wouldn’t turn on. That kept going until someone did it one too many times and freed the foul smelling machine spirit.

        • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
          9·
          15 days ago

          So anyone feel free to disbelieve, but me and a friend ran our elementary school’s IBM network when we were 12. I don’t know the proper name for it, but it was a bunch of dumb terminals (CRT displays) with keyboard hooked up to an actual computer I never knew the physical location of. We were able to fix any problems just by fucking around with it, it was a simple system, and the school didn’t have to pay a tech to come out. So we had admin password. We used to play hacker games starting at the same time trying to knock each other off the network and change passwords fast enough. We could see who was logged in and a few shitty kids had their terminals just lock up somehow so they had to start over. Womp womp.

          There were a few games on there that weren’t educational. They weren’t accessible without at least supervisor password so you could get terminal access.

          I’ll pay a bounty to anyone who can get a proper executable of IBM CHOPPER that will work on Windows. I’ve searched before and I can’t get it. That game was so fucking fun. It’s a sidescroller helicopter combat game with 8 bit colors, played with a keyboard. $100 bucks to anyone who can get me a working copy or good emulation.

          Edit- jaybone figured it out and won the bounty! It was Chopper Commando.

        • boonhet@lemm.ee
          7·
          15 days ago

          Some kids did that here too, but the effect was more fun and immediate because we’re on 240 volts.

        • metaStatic@kbin.earth
          7·
          16 days ago

          yeah that button was a game changer, honestly wouldn’t even bother if the school had those.

          We had to rub them face down on the carpet to get them somewhere close to normal.

  • Maiq@lemy.lol
    55·
    15 days ago

    I remember being in 4-5th grade and learning about graphs. Specifically x & y coordinates. One day while cleaning the mouse ball before playing Joust or whatnot I noticed two little geared spindle thingy’s. I vividly remember it clicking that those gears were translating the physical mouses x&y to the screens cursor’s x&y.

    • mapleseedfall@lemmy.world
      51·
      15 days ago

      this is how most of us learned computer right? You want to play something, it doesnt work or only partialy so you open it up and learned how to fix shit.

      • uranibaba@lemmy.world
        39·
        15 days ago

        That’s my problem with Apple. They hide all files, treating is as a magic box with an incredible search function. But it prevents the user from understanding, and thus learning.

        • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          14 days ago

          Gen Z as well. My childhood was all cracking things open and seeing what’s inside. Then when I was in my teens they stopped making things easily openable. Fuckers

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    33·
    15 days ago

    You’re all liars because no one has mentioned the smell.

    Use common sense! You think nerds changed their egg out on time?

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    23·
    16 days ago

    I gave my technically illiterate father a led mouse for Christmas just as they became the normal, and it was like a miracle to him.

    • bunchberry@lemmy.world
      5·
      15 days ago

      i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.

      • Random_Character_A@lemmy.world
        2·
        14 days ago

        Can’t see myself playing FPS without a trackball. You can also use lower mouse sensitivity for higher accuracy, because you can flick. If you don’t like that all the time, there’s also good old Wolfenstain Enemy Territory trick where you bind the trigger button to drop your mouse sensitivity for that easy headshot.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
        2·
        14 days ago

        You make good points and it’s very rational, but for some reason, having used an optical mouse for most of my life but also knowing what a trackball is like (but just not being used to one, it accounting for like 0.005% of my mouse usage or something), I just…

        • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
          1·
          14 days ago

          They must be comparing a wired track ball mouse to wireless mice.
          Having used trackball mice quite a lot before optical mice became common place, I can see a good wired trackball mouse being more responsive than an optical or even wireless laser mouse, but you would have to buy a truly craptastic wired laser mouse to find a trackball mouse better. The only way I could see it even being a possibility is if your desktop is made of glossy plastic or something else that could confuse the laser.

          • Dasus@lemmy.world
            1·
            14 days ago

            I can see it being more responsive yes, and all the other benefits he mentions as well.

            It’s just such a different way of controlling the aim of your character that my brain refuses to believe it’s any good. I’ve seen some gamers going with one of those actually large trackballs (whereas the one I was thinking about was like a huge ergonomic mouse which had a trackball on top of it. Not tiny, but not massive and you only used your thumb to move it.

            If you use one of those massive ones you can use your entire hand on, then where’d you click? Like if you don’t click, just aim, then the other hand has to do moving and shooting, and in games like deadlock you’re already kinda full with things you have to manage on kb.

            But yeah I def see your point, thinking of like early 2000’s optical mice. I just a few months ago bought the first wireless mouse for like 20 years. I didn’t trust their speed in gaming (even though I managed to game with the wireless one 20 years ago as well.)

            It’s just it’d take so much getting used to. Like in League I’m jealous of the people who started playing using custom key binds and moving the camera from the keyboard. I think it just is objectively better (because you don’t need to take your cursor away from the enemy to move your screem, etc), but I’m just getting to such an age that I can’t be bothered to learn a completely new control scheme to replace one I be used for more than 10 years.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
    18·
    14 days ago

    This meme is just wrong

    An egg that large is for a trackball.

    You need to hard boil a quail’s egg for a mouse.

    • Veneroso@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      14 days ago

      When you’re right, you’re right.
      They’re not cheaper though, due to the relative supply shortages.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    15 days ago

    Lol I used to take the balls out as a prank, see how long the teacher would wiggle it and check the cable before they flipped it lol.

  • tetris11@lemmy.world
    6·
    14 days ago

    anyone remember that brief period before led mice got good, where you’d have to SLAM the mouse in a direction to get it to comply?

    Rubber mice, that was a given sometimes, but led mice had the same issue for a bit

  • Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 days ago

    I worked for a computer store in the 90’s. The owner got the contract for all the PC’s in that part of the state in schools. One school was constantly calling about the mice not working. We would show up and start replacement them and those little assholes would be throwing the balls out of them across the room before we finished replacing them. We started using epoxy to seal them in. They would get gummed up bit it wasn’t our problem.