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 worked for my district’s IT department when I was in high school. I think my sophomore or junior year.
It was pretty cool really. Mostly it was transcoding VHS tapes into MPEGs, but occasionally I got to do odd jobs around the school district.
Once I got yelled at by a grade school secretary, and treated with suspicion even after she had called my boss at the district IT office to confirm I was indeed there to replace a graphics card on a computer.
While she was walking me to the library or classroom or whatever she took the box from me, pointed to the 3D orc on the box, and said in the bitchiest possible tone, “So what is this? Is this supposed to be part of the curriculum?”
I calmly said, “No ma’am, that’s just the advertising the manufacturer puts on the packaging. It’s a graphics card, it can be used to play games so they advertise that.”
“Well kids shouldn’t be playing these kinds of games in school!”
“It’s a graphics card. It’s how the computer displays any kind of graphics on the screen. The computer needs a new one. I don’t know why, I’m just doing what I was told.”
Man that woman was so much of a bitch I remember that interaction better than most of high school.
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 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!
… bring your own mouse. keep it in your locker. your parents are at work. your siblings are at school. it’s nbd.
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.
Only caught the tail end of that era, so elementary school. Probably some kid did, but I never heard about it.
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
If that happened today, everyone would blame TikTok.
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.
It was still version 1.0 from 1987 or so
Ooh, ooh…I did that.
I 'member
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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.
Yup. I was a nerd who got to go inside and boot up the computers and set them back from what the kids had done the day before every morning. Warning sounds with SNL skits were popular at one point, as was messing with the icons.
It was instead of standing outside in the cold wet concrete courtyard for 20 minutes before the first bell.
First job was turning the mouses back over (the were left balls up at the end of each class).
Out go to prank was a shut down bat file, disguised as GTA.exe. We used to put that in a shared folder and waited for other students to shut down their computers.
Ha, these were early Macs (right at the launch of System 7) there was only a few kids with these at home so I had a pretty good idea who was brining in the icons and sound files (aiff if I recall correctly). We had one at my home too btw. They were interesting computers but besides shareware and a couple game companies, they were abysmal for games. We did get a copy of Warcraft 1 and could play it over 14.4k directly dialed to the other computer lines with PC users.
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.
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
Turns out you could use an xacto and carve the rubber coating off and the steel ball was a perfect fit for a paintball gun. No winners had there.
Jesus, could that actually kill someone?
Nah, it didn’t have enough oomph to break skin but it left nasty bruises. It could have claimed an eye or teeth though
We used to huck em at each other’s nuts
Never change, kids
There are no winners in a game of Ball Ball
No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
The best was when you got a “full peel” from a really dirty wheel without it breaking into pieces.
Doing God’s work!
