By the time I hit grade school the balls were outdated.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
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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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'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.
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.
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
It's like so many things. We were okay with what we had until something came along to vastly improve it. Internet and computer speeds, storage sizes, graphics. We did seem to forget how having good gameplay is important though in some modern games, got distracted by the eye candy.
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 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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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.
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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.
No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.
Until reading this, I had forgotten that mouse balls were even a thing.
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.
Ooh, ooh...I did that.
Today students pick keycaps off of keyboards and steal anything not tied down (so instead of just the ball, the entire mouse gets stolen). Once I heard a student ran off with an entire side panel of a computer
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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)
Yeah, I always tried to use them as a pencil eraser. They were never very effective but I still always tried.
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.
Yes, yes I do remember doing that. Not just at school. Use to do it to dad. When he was being annoying sometimes.