• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      14·
      14 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
        13·
        14 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·
        14 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·
          14 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·
          14 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·
          14 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
    53·
    14 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
      50·
      14 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
        38·
        14 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·
          13 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
    31·
    14 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
    22·
    14 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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
    18·
    13 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·
      13 days ago

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

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    7·
    14 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·
    13 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·
    13 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.