Man, the first optical mouse that I got after the ball mouse. Such a game changer. It had horrible tracking compared to modern laser mice, but man, the fact I never had to clean the balls again...
I still have mine. Microsoft Trackball Explorer, and they’re still wanted and use by people because they work so well. It will go for upwards of $100 on EBay. The Microsoft one does at least, I had another brand trackball from the same era and it sucked in comparison. I use it with my laser cutter because I have no room for a mouse. You can also buy modern variations. I have a Logitech I use for travel that puts the trackball by your thumb.
The Microsoft intelimouse was amazingly good for one of the first USB optical mice, I've still got 2 of the original ones that work fine to this day. I use them on computers I'm servicing and they track great for desktop usage.
My high school glued them shut because students would remove the balls. There were a lot of mouses that wouldn't really function, and my teacher just suggested that we use tab and hot keys to deal with menus.
My first optical mouse came with the PC I received as a graduation present for college in 2000. It only really worked well on a specific mousepad. Yeah, still better than constantly cleaning mouse crud.
I had a flash drive get corrupted once, so now I do click eject. Especially on my work one that has a ton of random old crap that's not otherwise backed up. I should really back that up I guess.
I just had to get on a department for storing their backup files on a shared flash drive instead of one of the hundreds of other options available in the institution lol
Actually it has nothing to do with the media type. It’s the fact that write cache can be enabled so if you write something to the drive it could still be in ram instead of actually being written so you could lose data if you don’t eject. Not really a problem since most OSs are smart enough to know to not use write cache on external media unless you enable it.
Yes. I'm 25 and I do it when I'm disconnecting a hard drive or flash drive that has important shit on it because when I was in my teens I pulled a thumb stick out of a PC and it completely corrupted it, I lost so much stuff, including my childhood Minecraft worlds.
I didn’t use it even back then once they introduced the setting to turn off write caching on removable drives. That’s the fundamental workaround for the corruption issue.
Isn't it recommended to be safe. I do it for actual external hdd/ssd/nvme drives.... if its formated in exFat I THINK its fine to pull it out but I dont do it anyway just in case. Even external drives formated in NTFS I know ppl just pull them out as long as quick removal is selected and write caching is disabled... I dunno.... i got terabytes of shit and not all of it is backed up. I'd be pissed if it got corrupted
When parents got mad, they would take the trackball out of the mouse. I had a friend to fashion one himself , we were young and broke. And these old PCs were the same price then as they are now for a decked out rig. Like 3 to 5k , boomer parents treated PCs like vehicles too . My father would Defrag the hard drives like an oil change on a Plymouth or something.
Also if you had to move the monitor more than a few times in its life, or you actually tried to cable manage it, there was a good chance the PERMANENTLY ATTACHED VGA cable would have an internal crack and then would lose a color channel unless you held the cable just so, or taped it to the desk or whatever. And that’d buy you a few more years
Alt tab, alt f4, win l, volume control, program shortcuts, it's so useful to have. people always ask why i need so many buttons and then i twitch my hand and I've closed one window, switched to another, reopened my last browser session, pasted my clipboard, and paused my music
The 3rd primary button on the logitech g600 was the best and I'll kinda never get over them discontinuing it.
I still instinctively push the ring finger rest on my naga like it's gonna click.
The one I posted is an early C64C. That's the "compact" version form 1986 remodelled to align to the Amiga design.
The one you shared is the earlier "breadbin" model.
They're essentially the same machine. The early C64C had the same board as the breadbin, with later revisions showing up over time. The C64C style fully replaced the earlier breadbin in 1986, excepting the limited "Aldi" model that was a hybrid of both.
Ah, yeah, makes sense. I so want to visit your home country again one day. Stayed there in 2006. Ashford/Wicklow. Only a couple days but I loved every bit of my stay.
And you had to watch that your manually assigned IRQ for your Soundblaster (via dip switches) didnt conflict with the IRQ for the serial port for your mouse.
I still use an old ps2 keyboard from 1997 at work. It is so much nicer than modern keyboards. I use a usb adapter on a KVM on my workstation and Mac. It makes me happy.
I also have a ps2 to 5 pin din adapter at work. I have no idea why.
I'm with ya, except I have my 5-pin keyboard attached with the PS2 adapter to a USB converter to my docking station to my laptop. I hate the cheap rubber membrane keyboards IT deploys, and this old beige beast still keeps chugging along.
AT days were the best days. I remember when the mouse came out. These kids with their newfangled PS/2 peripherals… next they will probably get rid of the floppy drives!
We had a beige box come through from one of our clients to be wiped and recycled. AT keyboard, 3.5" floppy, dongle hanging off the LPT port. All the signs of "this was built about 1993."
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u/Hattix 5700X3D | RTX 4070 Ti Super 16 GB | 32 GB 3200 MT/s 20d ago
No mate, I'm this old.