I have this, for obvious reasons i can’t link it but i have one.
I do. When modern mouses stop working, I feel useless.
These worked on glass. Almost nothing today works on a glass table but these did
This comment made me curious so I tested the two mice I use regularly.
My Logitech G502 tracks very poorly on glass and is basically unusable.
My MX Anywhere 2S lives up to its name and seems to track perfectly fine.
I use a thumb-trackball (and have since the 90s). They work on glass. Hell, they work on my lap or beside me if I’m in bed. And no space needed to move around.
Every week or two I pop the ball out and give it a quick wipe with a lenscloth.
I love my thumb-trackball. Doesn’t matter where I use it, it will always work.
I use a mouse pad, it works pretty well.
I have a “magic trackpad” from apple on a side table to use when I’m watching or reading something and recline too much to reach the mouse.
It’s nice (and with some free driver I found can do multi touch on windows), but for some reason it had a battery (despite having a fixed usb cable) which pillowed up making it unusable until I literally ripped it off (damn thing had more glue than battery).
Obviously works fine without the battery, which I assume is just an attempt at extremely inefficient planned obsolescence, but I wouldn’t recommend it, too much of a fire hazard if you don’t notice the trap.
At least you know wired mice won’t blow your hand up, and I value that more than the convenience.
Did anyone actually clean their mice like this?
Yeah, you kinda had to at a certain point, the gunk would inhibit the ball from rolling freely.
I remember cleaning the ball once or twice, yes, when it got too bad to ignore.
Mostly the gunk accumulated on the rollers, though (and under the mouse, like in optical ones), and that was easier and faster to just scratch off with your nail… except for the little third wheel (seen on the bottom left picture) that kept the ball centered, of course, because that one wasn’t only smaller but on a spring, making it almost impossible to scratch the gunk off of.
There was also the occasional hair tangled up on a roller, of course, which was almost impossible to remove. Those you just pushed aside onto the roller’s axle and hoped the mouse would die of some electrical failure before the poor thing got too full of hair to roll.
There was always a kind of lint that would develop on the wheel inside. I’ve got no idea what it was made out of.
Yes.
Id get in there with my child fingers and scratch the wad of gunk off. Usually id end up wedging it in the housing but thats my dad’s problem.
What? No velcro mouse ball to clean the wheels?
I removed the puppy grime sick with dust and dog hair from the rollers rather often.
Yeah, hated boiling the eggs every week or so.
Came to the comments to check for this.
Exactly why I opened the comments as well.
I loved breaking the little dust rolls wrapped around the direction shafts
For a long time I thought those were built-in special rolls.
You’re chipping hand cheese off the rollers on the top and the side, or today when you need to do the same to the rolly third/middle mouse button. It’s the same thing!
Those sucked
I mean they beat the old arrow keys (wasd hadn’t been invented yet), and were better than most joysticks of the time…
Those balls were usually steel ball bearings with a synthetic rubber wrapped around it. They gave the entire mouse some weight which made the mouse feel better to use. You could clean them with something like soap, but you’d have to be careful not to use anything that messed up the rubber. Some people cleaned them wrong, which caused the rubber to become more sticky and thus get dirty sooner. You’d also risk the rubber becoming harder and not sticky enough, so they would slip a lot. They were basically a pain in the ass and I’m happy we’ve moved on from that.
Got it: be careful when rubbing the balls otherwise they’ll get too sticky or hard
Also that everyone in 90s was cupping balls of steel
…
I would go back to that mouse right now. My current mouse doesn’t work on windows because windows hates us. My cursor jumps a half an inch when randomly on certain things i click on. It’s a known issue with no solution from microsoft.
I bet an analog mouse with basic drivers would work just fine.
Eh, these also used to jump all over the place once you got too much gunk or hair on the rollers, and were orders of magnitude slower and less precise.
I wouldn’t go back unless I was forced to work on a glass table, and I hear there are some optical mice that can work on glass now, so probably not even then.
You can in a way. I use a trackball mouse. Cleans about the same, nostalgic every time. Plus my wrist doesn’t hurt anymore.
Holy frick what mouse do you have?
I have provisioned hundreds of different mice over the decades and never had anything nearly that bad, and that’s including the gen 1 optical mice.
It’s a windows issue, not the mouse. Every mouse has the same issue. My mouse works fine on linux.
I second rumba’s experience. Your problem is very strange
Scratch blow close 9/10. (With a personal mouse. Computer lab mice had clearly seen some things and needed the alcohol.)
I use a trackball and clean mine every few days. It just takes a quick swipe of the rollers though no soap or anything crazy.
Eww…is that Saurons eye?
No, his ball.
Never washed the ball. I did clean out the runners inside though. They hid away dead skin grime and pet fur better than any keyboard ever will.
Edit: I give my work keyboard a tip and tap once a week or so and have been asked why I do it. I explained it’s basically a hygeine thing, explaining why, and was told it’s disgusting. Encouraged colleagues to do it and they were mortified with the mess left on their desks. It was like they just dealt with the consequences of opening up their car engine after neglecting to oil change for 150,000 miles.
WHO’S DISGUSTING NOW???
They can try take the high road, but I’ve seen how many icons are on their desktops, so I basically know how messy their bedroom floor is.
I use an air compressor to clean out my personal keyboard. Good reminder to do it at work tomorrow for my work one, too.
Rick: “Your boos mean nothing, I know what apps you use!”
Btw, why was there a ball, not just a horizontal and vertical wheely on the base?
Because the ball rolls smoothly in any direction. The wheels do not roll at all parallel to their axles, they just slide which is not as smooth.
The first computer mouse did have two wheels
Wait, is that wheel for scrolling?
That’s the bottom of the mouse
Oh.
Wait, are those bite marks on the other wheel?
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Mostly the fact that it can only move in 2 directions.
But 2D space has only 2 directions. ↔, ↕ and everything inbetween. I mean, use 2 wheels, 90° angled.
It’s the everything in between where you get problems
Set up two wheels and try to drag them diagonally, see what happens.
And that way? \↑/
But ok, i guess it is either too scratchy on fabric or too less grip on smooth surfaces.
Imagine trying to move that mouse in a circular motion
Yeah, that’s the way I mean. If the wheels in your figure there were at 90° angles, it wouldn’t work at all. The very best case scenario would be that it would input up then right over and over the whole time you’re dragging.
Just wheelies wouldn’t be able to handle diagonal movement. The mouse would kind of scrape as it tried to move in non-aligned directions.
you would drag one of the wheels regardless of direction. This also happens with ball mice, but you don’t notice becase the wheel dragging is tiny and made to be a little bit slippery… which is also part of why they need to be cleaned every so often
