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!
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
Worked in an office where everyone had a Macbook and wireless mouse. Getting in early and swapping some of the mice around was SOP.
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.
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.
Yes, yes I do remember doing that. Not just at school. Use to do it to dad. When he was being annoying sometimes.
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)
Until reading this, I had forgotten that mouse balls were even a thing.
Yeah, I always tried to use them as a pencil eraser. They were never very effective but I still always tried.
No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.
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.
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 ~~robots~~humans do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will ~~people~~cats 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.
No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
Doing God's work!
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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'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
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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.
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.
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i think you're missing the part where a lot of that gunk is exactly bodily fluids and other biohazards lol
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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!
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...
LOL I assumed it was some sort of weird prank.
Kind of a dick move.
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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.
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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
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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.
I definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
neutered
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.
