I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago
@nixCraft The kids today look at me funny when I tell them it used to be part of my job to wash mouse balls.
@nixCraft
I can still smell the ammonia from paper fresh off the mimeograph machine. "Blueprints" were blue and smelled of ammonia. There was no color TV. I walked 1.3 miles each way to school. I used a slide rule for AC circuits. The first computer I saw was in college. They used paper tapes and punch cards. "Mini computers" were DEC Vax machines with switch inputs to enter machine language commands. A "4 banger" calculator (+-*/) was $100.
Later there were 8" floppies and 30MB hard drives as big as wedding cakes. But by then the dinosaurs had disappeared and men became our biggest threat.
@nixCraft I used to clean the wheels with my nails.
Often users confessed that they noticed the layer of black grime but they thought that was "rubber" to protect the wheels.
@nixCraft Eliminating the need to clean mice and untangling telephone cords = most of the productivity improvements of the 90s.
@nixCraft I earnt internet credit/time doing this in the IT room in secondary school/high school
@nixCraft still have to do this with my Logitech MX Ergo (modern ergonomic mouse) mouse ball :D
@nixCraft my solution was getting a new mouse every second year when it was so dirty that you couldn't use it.
@nixCraft About 25 years ago, I wrote an Op/Ed entitled, "Are Those Mouse Balls in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?"
It was about sales clerks in a computer store that carried around dozens of replacement mouse balls b/c kids kept stealing them.
@nixCraft Am I the only person who used to put the ball in my mouth to clean whilst sorting out the rollers?
@nixCraft
Scene: a middle-school computer lab, mid-1990s.
One computer stands quiet, inert. It is entirely unusable, and has been so for months.
This is because some ninny stole the ball from its mouse, you can't just replace a mouse ball (and even replacing the whole mouse is an iffy proposition because Dell), and nobody in the building knows how to use Windows 95 without it.
@nixCraft Me too. I can just remember this, when I was young and innocent in the ways of IT equipment...
@nixCraft now they would intentionally "end support" for the mouse before this could happen to "protect" you as a consumer.
@nixCraft let they who have never had such a dirty work space they had to clean crud off the X and Y rollers on a daily basis cast the first stone
@nixCraft @ygalanter I had a desk drawer at work full of those stupid balls. Lmao.
@nixCraft The mouse ball is a toy, it is perfectly legit to pluck it out of there and play with it outside and lose it.
@nixCraft same - minus removing the ball - also applies to optical mice today...
You may need to clean the sensor at some point.
@nixCraft OMG This is the holy grail PROOF!!!! that the dawn of the GUI was not milk and honey. Cleaning the trackball was not the worst but at best an unfavored task lol
@nixCraft Geez, yes, giving the rollers a wipe-down with a cotton swab, done that… but washing the ball? That seems like overkill.
@nixCraft And if you were bored, you could pop them out and hit them around the office with your umbrellas.
(To be fair, compilation got up to 90 minutes and we didn't always have things to do back then)
Love the "cook a hardboiled egg to replace it" memes 😅
It's funny that before that, the Apple ][ had this crosshairs mouse with no ball but a special mat.
@nixCraft used to be part of our "computer club" in secondary school we had to take a lab and clean all the mice every few days, wipe down the monitors, degaus them if they were looking funny... We had a special tool for cleaning the rollers as well, a plastic handle with a cotton "mouse ball" on the end we'd roll around inside with cleaning fluid.
By the time I hit college they were all lasers, the fanciest thing ever.
*slams the mouse down on the mouse mat repeatedly and moves it around vigourously, to no avail*
If you stuck the mouse ball in fire, after a while it would show an inscription in the black speech of Mordor.
@nixCraft OK, but who ever used a cotton bud for this?! It was so satisfying to do with just your finger nail.
@nixCraft Ennen kosketuslevyjä oli pallo-ohjaimia läppäreissä, ne vaativat tuollaista huoltoa useammin kuin hiiren pallo.
@nixCraft it was usually cat hair wrapped around the little rollers. Always so satisfying to pluck and pull it out to restore mouse behavior. I used to do it habitually when using someone else's mouse.