Gosh. An intelligent user.

Well that explains the 99%, then.

Architects, at least in academia, appeared to use their tools as tools without investing much of themselves in those tools.

Drawing tablets like Wacom's have a relative mode (like mice) and an absolute mode either of which can be used with a GUI although the latter does feel rather peculiar.

The abs mental model of mouse that the architect had internalized was more like a Wacom tablet which was understandable.

Mechanical mice initially threw me too after using Sun optical mice.

Not that I recall mice came with a user guide (so not a case of RTFM) - any instructions concerned setting I/O ports and interrupts with serial (com) and (Logitech?) bus mice.

Ah, the Logitech bus mouse!

We had a three-button version for our home IBM PC-XT in the late 80s. It had a companion software where you could assign keyboard macros to the buttons, so I set mine up to do left - rotate - right for the Spectrum Holobyte version of Tetris.

Architects, at least in academia, appeared to use their tools as tools without investing much of themselves in those tools.

Drawing tablets like Wacom's have a relative mode (like mice) and an absolute mode either of which can be used with a GUI although the latter does feel rather peculiar.

The mental model of a mouse that the architect had internalized was more like a Wacom tablet which was understandable.

Mechanical mice initially threw me too after using Sun optical mice.

Not that I recall mice came with a user guide (so not a case of RTFM) - any instructions concerned setting I/O ports and interrupts with serial (com) and (Logitech?) bus mice.

"Fond" memories on an overnighter for a roll out.

Testers on two remote sites.

Phone rang post deployment complaining that a monitor wouldn't power on.

Asked the "is it plugged in" question with a "definitely" reply.

Drove across the City at 1am only to discover the User had looked over her monitor at the one behind and assumed that the kettle lead in-situ was hers.

Only when I drove off did I wonder whether the testing would be valid coming from someone so clueless.

"Lads, we found him. Pack it up."

When introducing people to new input devices or screen artefacts it's always good to remember that we aren't born knowing this stuff if someone doesn't grok it immediately then more often than not it's the explanation that is lacking. That being said, given that an architect works in a world of spatial relationships I might have been biting my lip to point of drawing blood in this instance.

Back when home computers did not come with built in hard disks I came across an unhappy customer. He wanted to know why his newly purchased external hard disk did not make his floppy disks go faster. There was nothing wrong with the guy's intelligence. He had successfully read the instructions, plugged it in and switched it on. The fault was with the instructions that did not explain what a hard disk is.

That The Register felt necessary to explain how mechanical mouses worked. Just wow.

I think the last mechanical mouse I used was over twenty years ago. Assuming my experience is typical, then that's a whole generation of IT staff who will have never seen a mechanical mouse.

Almost a grey beard -->

My last mechanical mouse finally died a coupla years ago.

Stepping back down to the relative imprecision of an optical mouse STILL gives me the irrits every day.

You CAN get equivalent optical mice: the high-end gaming jobs. But to regain the effortless casual precision of even the cheapest crappiest came-with-the-computer standard $5 mechanical mouse costs over A$200. Which gives me the irrits even more.

I'm still using one.

Admittedly, it's the only one I'm still using, it's at work, and all the others I use are optical. Don't really see all that much difference in normal day to day use...

I was lucky in that when I started working in IT, optical mice had just become cheap enough that I could justify buying them instead of 'ball mice' (as I call them).

I only had to spend the first year or so un-gumming rollers before I'd managed to replace them all.

"I think the last mechanical mouse I used was over twenty years ago"

Me too. And yet, the muscle memory from all those occasions of twisting open the ball cover and scratching away the congealed fluff on the rollers is still fresh as ever. It was most satisfying when I could clean each roller in only three nail scratches. If it was clean in two, then it was too easy a challenge. Four was always a disappointment.

When I read that I thought 'Damn, I must be old!"

I'm still taken aback my them being called "mechanical" - I still think of them as "mice" as distinct from "optical mice"

If needing a clearer disambiguation of mice, I tend to refer to the traditional variety as male and the newer type as female - the mechanical ones had balls, but optical ones don't.

I'm pretty sure that some (maybe all?) Mechanical mice used an optical sensor to sense the roller rotation. The light would shine through shots in a disk attached to the end of the roller.

~Mice~

Is it weird that I miss the days of cleaning the lint out of my mouse and ball?

All I get is to gently wipe the lint off the underside of my mouse, now that there's no balls, but it's not very satisfying. Maybe because the lint no longer impinges performance.

And not forgetting cleaning the crap off the rollers...

"And not forgetting cleaning the crap off the rollers..."

One of the few things in life I needed fingernails for.

With my fat fingers, fingernails weren't always an easy option for that. I used to always have my Leatherman on my belt at work and just used the knife on that to scrape off the crud when a mouse stopped working. The Wave was great in that you could take it out of the pouch, open up the blade and put it away after with one hand. It was also handy having a screwdriver on you at all times.

Ah, the Leatherman. Switched my EDC from a Swiss Army knife to a Leatherman about 20 years ago as the pliers had become almost a daily need. My 60th birthday present from my wife was a new Leatherman Charge Ti - has almost never been off my belt for the past 11 years. However, the blades are locking and that makes them illegal in the UK unless you can convince the police (or magistrate) you had valid reason to be carrying it in public. Not a problem around my local rural area but I no longer feel I can carry it elsewhere. I have a smaller Leatherman with slipjoint blades - nowhere near as robust as the Charge but UK legal.

I recently found a Leatherman with no blade (their Style PS) - discontinued and difficult to actually find one for sale in the UK. It's very small but has pliers and scissors (the two tools I find most useful) and has the advantage that's it's legal in aircraft hand luggage.

Sorry, totally off-topic :)

Yes, I recall having to regularly open up my mouse to clean the rollers - with my Victorinox knife.

Still loving my Wave, partially for the very reason you mention. Though I nearly took one of my fingers off some ten years ago when a colleague handed me his Wave for opening a package or something, and he had it in stuffed in the pouch with the *serrated* blade facing out. Everybody knows that you have the flat blade facing the flap, so that you CAN do the one-handed flip...

Tangentially related, when I started carrying my Leatherman on my belt for work, I discovered there's no limit to how many loose screws you can find as you're going about your day. One morning I found six screws that needed tightening on the bus to work alone.

Everyone has a screw loose somewhere...

That smug, god-like, feeling after successfully removing the crud from the roller in one clean piece.

Ah yes.

Or alternatively the frustration at school when you realise they've superglued the little cover in place to stop kids nicking the ball out of the mouse, so you're stuck with a gummy, jolty and frankly horrid mouse to use...

Some of us clean our balls virtually every day.

But that's just personal hygiene.

And some of us have somebody else to do that.

Whatever happened to the Paris Hilton icon?

Many many years ago we had a photo copier which was very basic. In order to do double sided you had to print on one side, then put the paper back into the input paper hopper. If you got it the right way up you got double sided. ( I was doing 50 + copies).

We got a new all singing and dancing copier. So I carried on the way I had been shown. One day a secretary waiting to use the copier, asked "What are you trying to do?". I explained about duplex printing. She said "why not use this duplex print option?"

Next day all the copiers had some instructions.

- In order to print two sided - press the... button

- In order to shrink A3 input to A4 utput press the ... button

- If the paper jams, look here, here and here.

Ah, so that's what the duplex button is for. (Posted anon due to the shame of not knowing).

I'be been in my current role (3rd line infrastructure at a uni) for 3 years now and have managed not to use a photocopier or print one single sheet of paper in that time. I think the digital office is finally just about here, and the uni are drastically reducing the printer fleet around campus.

I've not used the office printer for business reasons in about 10 years. Still handy to have it for personal printouts though...

Many years ago, early 90s, I was an intern in a company.

The company was deploying SUN workstations (so, no longer mech. mice but proper optical ones, the bummer was actually the metal mouse carpet, which had tiles and were orientation sensitive).

It fell on me to train batches of users on the basic usage of a mouse: drag pointer from here to there, click on an icon.

I swear, with one lady, after one and a half hour trying, she was NEVER able to reach the bloody icon ! She was just staring at the mouse itself, despite my protests, and would always go past the carpet, never to lift the mouse to put it back on, drag the pointer away from the icon, etc ...

She was young (30s), very educated and all, but absolutely unable to use the bloody thing ...

"These mouse balls would sometimes always pick up lint and gum up the rollers inside the mouse"

FTFY.

How could I have forgotten those.

At times I thought I missed my calling and should have become a urologist. If you're going to spend half your life inspecting them, might as well get paid for it!

I had something similar when training someone who was new to these new fangled mouse things - I explained that you move the mouse, and the pointer on the screen would move - so they picked up the mouse and put it on the screen, and then moved it, complaining that it was then hard to see where the pointer was with the mouse in the way.

Atari ST circa 1988

I didn't realise the collected crud wasn't needed, thought it was some kind of grip material and glued it back on the roller with superglue.

Anonymous because it's still embarrassing almost 40 years later.

Explained that the cable needed to head towards the back of the desk rather than the front.

I had exactly the same experience with a user of the fancy image processing system I developed, complaining that the mouse cursor was moving in the opposite direction of the mouse. Rotating the mouse 180 degrees worked wonders.

This was a few minutes after I explained that the way to get the camera image on the screen to align with the view through the microscope was to rotate the camera by 180 degrees.

She did take it well, but turned bright crimson.