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.
I remember doing work experience at school in the computer lab. Thought I was gonna learn fun stuff on the servers, ended up cleaning gunk from the rollers if every mouse in the entire school (And cleaning every PC out, and flashing entire labs one by one with updates OS…)
I was in highschool at this point and I totally would have ratted any kid out for that.
No mouse balls would mean no Quake or StarCraft in the lab after school… Unacceptable!
If that happened today, everyone would blame TikTok.
I only did it once, because I hated the teacher and I guess I thought that would send a message. I was immediately caught and the kid who saw me pocket it kept saying I “liked mouse balls,” so it really backfired pretty spectacularly.
I 'member
Those balls were nasty as fuck. I remember when I was like 13 and the mouse at my dad’s pc wasn’t working right. A friend recommended cleaning the ball…it was disgusting.
TIL kids would steal these.
My library made us take the balls out and give them to the librarian when we were done with the computer.
We used to huck em at each other’s nuts
We used to huck em at each other’s nuts
Never change, kids
There are no winners in a game of Ball Ball
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Crazy to see this in my feed, I was just thinking about this the other day. I didn’t steal the balls, but I remember figuring out that I could remove them and clean the crud off of the rolling components inside to smooth my cursor movement. (This would have been 3rd or 4th grade.)
Kids these days will never know the satisfaction of opening the bottom, removing the ball, and then taking an unfolded paperclip to remove all the built up crud and hair on the components inside. I would do this anytime I was left alone in my mom’s office while she had a meeting or something.
i did this everywhere i went it was so amazing
Youre mom probably wondered why her mouse started working smoother.
I always keep an old toothbrush in my pencil cup for cleaning the mouse contacts. I dont use a mouse, I’ve always used a track ball, and now and then you have to pop out the ball and clean the accumulated crud out of the contacts.
By the time I hit grade school the balls were outdated. So I missed out on this. What I didnt miss out on was finding a broken (exposed) usb stick and when I would plug it into a computer it would shock me a bit and the computer would shut down. I felt like I had the ultimate power in my hands
My school “solved” this problem by letting students use 386 with DOS, Turbo Pascal and Lotus 123 until the early 2000s, when optical mice were available.
Jesus, I was using Turbo Pascal in the 80s. Had no idea it even still existed in 2000. Flex: I wrote my own BBS in Turbo Pascal and ran if for a couple years in Portland - Tomb of the Unknown Modem.
In my school, the teacher’s computer had software running to remotely control the student’s computers, lock them or see a mosaic of all the student screens to make sure they are doing what they should be doing.
Except, the computers were all run with admin rights and you could just open the task manager, kill a couple processes, and the remove software didn’t work.
We always said it just must have been buggy software.
Sorry Mr. W. You were one of my favorite teachers, but that secret had to be kept a close secret between students
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.
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.
