Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right As another week drains down the plughole of history, it's time for The Register to once again deliver a fresh instalment of On Call – our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support torments and triumphs. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Barry," who shared a story from the early 1990s, when he was a student of IT …
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.
Q: Have you been able to run Spectrum Holobyte Tetris in DOSbox and get the sound to work?
I have tried everything but still cannot get it to play the music, and I know it can do that, because I'm running the exact program that worked on my PC-XT. I do remember it auto-detects the sound card, but DOSbox assures me that it can emulate almost any sound card ever made, and, in any case,we had none, but some TSR that let you use the PC speaker.
It's just not the same Tetris without the cheesy Russian 8-bit tunes.
I don’t recall there being music in my version of the game in the first place? This would have been 1988-1989 or so, before sound cards were generally available (or at least affordable). Just had a look at some gameplay videos[0] now (my old floppies disappeared many moves ago) so I don’t think it’s just dementia on my part… I clearly remembered the CLICK when completing a line, but as I recall it, it was only accompanied by the sound of buckling springs being hammered by teenagers…?
[0] Turns out watching people play Tetris on YouTube is just as frustrating as watching people play Tetris in real life. They’re clearly all idiots.
Thanks for the recollection!
There was definitely music, but ISTR there was a trick to it, maybe a TSR? This was the original 1988 version, with the Cessna on the splash screen. I get the click sounds, but the music is missing, and the manual for the IBM PC version, which might have a clue, is nowhere to be found online. Some kind sould on eBay will sell me something they claim is the manual, but they want $40 for a copy, so that's not on.
I think at that time soundblaster was the a-priori standard. My guess is make sure soundblaster emulation is on: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Sound#Sound_Blaster and maybe try the different flavors.
DOSBOX comes setup to emulate sb16. You might need to set it to a more primitve type in the config file https://www.dosbox.com/DOSBoxManual.html#ConfigFile - try sb2 for instance.
Dosbox doesn't emulate covox/speechthing I think, it's a sound card that plugs into the parallel printer port (you could solder together some resistors and other components yourself to make one). Might that have been the sound device?
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.
"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."
In the early days of mice, they not only came with a user guide explaining how to use it, they almost always came with some form of drawing/paint program with full instructions to give you practice and experience in using the mouse. But that was a different era and not everyone used a computer of any kind, let alone one with such esoteric input devices. By the time mice became ubiquitous, they stopped including all that extra information so as computers themselves became more ubiquitous and more and more people were being introduced to them, the help and info was already gone or relegated to a short, small print paragraph. I think including Reversi, Patience (aka Klondike) and Minesweeper in Windows from the very early days was intended to give users some "playtime" to learn to use the mouse properly.
"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.
Eons ago a similar experience but testing was one person from each department checking everything they did in the department worked on the new system. One user complained it didn’t and someone needed to come up. So off went someone who discovered that the system was fine but the rollerball mouse (that was filthy) had been replaced during the rollout with an optical one. User said that the ball had been stolen and it “won’t work without it”.
"assumed that the kettle lead in-situ was hers"
Not wishing to be pedantic but... Oh sod it, it's Sunday and I don't give a stuff.
The connectors used on most equipment described as "kettle leads" are technically NOT "kettle" leasds. They are IEC C13 (lead)/C14 (equipment) connectors.
"Kettle" leads, strictly speaking, are the "hot" (high temperature) variant which is the C15 (lead)/C16 (appliance) combination which have a notch at the bottom.
A C15 lead can be used in place of a C13 lead as it fits equipment with a C14 connector.
However, you CANNOT use a C13 lead with something which has a C16 connector - the notch is there to stop you.
And it is a common "user misconception".
Saying "kettle lead" to them they are more likely to understand you than "is the C13 plugged in". They might think you are talking about some Sinclair electric vehicle LOL - "I can't see as it is in the car park".
Not to mention ALL the "ON" switches being "ON". Especially with equipment plugged into multiway extension blocks etc. with individual switches. Knowing "users", probably "daisy chained" as well.
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.
I bought a pair of headphones recently, bog standard wired headphones with no fancy controls on them or anything else non standard, and they came with a mini 76 page user manual (OK, it repeats everything in about 12 different languages). I found it hard to see how you would be smart enough to read the manual, if you weren't capable of working out that you just had to plug them into the headphone socket.
"if you weren't capable of working out that you just had to plug them into the headphone socket."
There may be people out there by now who have never used wired headphones, only ever Bluetooth. Have a look at some of the videos on YouTube showing kids being given "old" technology to play with, discover, describe and attempt to use. Never assume :-)
So much documentation nowadays seems to be based on quantity, not quality. NI's TestStand help files have many entries that look like: wamboozle frozzinator -- set to "off" if you want the frozzinator off. Set to "on" if you want the frozzinator on.
Duh, no shit, maybe explain what the option is, and *why* you might select a given option, I worked out the on/off part on my own, thank you.
Lots of software manuals like that - field on screen with label "Company Name" - OLH is "enter the company name in this field". As an alternative I also lie the OLH which is really helpful IF you already know what it is you're trying to look up but otherwise you have no idea how to find out.
IIRC, there were also 'absolute' mice at the time, so it was a reasonable assumption.
One of the competing technologies was an optical mouse that used a special mat with a particular pattern on it. No ball to gum up!
Other absolute input devices included light pens for drawing directly on the screen and "digitizers", the forerunner to modern Wacom tablets.
Of course, these days most people are familiar with touch screens - another absolute input device!
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.
Same here, except on certain surfaces. Most entertaining was rolling out new kit with the then newly popular optical mice in a lab. They didn't work. Not even a little bit. The perfectly white, smooth and lab-clean worktops had no texture for the mouse sensors to "see". It was the sort of lab where you don't want any contaminants. It was full "bunny suit" to be allowed in to install the kit and mouse mats tend to collect contaminants.
Well the obvious fix for "optical mouse won't work on shiny surface" is to give it a non-shiny mat. There are metal ones (possibly clean-room friendly) with a textured surface intended to be ideal for optical mouses. I once had one made of frosted glass too but that didn't survive the inadvertent drop-test onto concrete.
Now I'm wondering what I'm missing. My memory of mechanical mice was irritation when the rollers got grungy, and the first symptom was jumpy pointer behaviour. I'm using a cheap Logitech wireless optical mouse right now, and I can move the pointer in single pixel increments. How much more precise can it be? My limitation is pretty much just the stiction of the little plastic pads that touch my desk.
One fun project I did at work when optical mice first came out was to gut one and put it above a rubber conveyor belt at a production facility, sort of like a long supermarket cash register conveyor belt. We used it to measure the belt speed by reading the signals coming off the IC. It was way cheaper than anything marketed for the purpose.
One fun project I did at work when optical mice first came out was to gut one and put it above a rubber conveyor belt at a production facility, sort of like a long supermarket cash register conveyor belt. We used it to measure the belt speed by reading the signals coming off the IC. It was way cheaper than anything marketed for the purpose.
Have a virtual pint for brilliant lateral thinking.
I once built a pendulum clock from PC components. The pendulum was hanging from the head arm of a HDD and used the coils to nudge it when it slowed down. The swing was monitored by a mechanical mouse sensor that incremented the clock on every swing and measured the swing speed by looking at the time taken to traverse the mouse sensor.
All done in discrete 74xx and 4000 series logic - lots of it.
"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.
then that's a whole generation of IT staff who will have never seen a mechanical mouse.
If I had to guess I'd say the majority of those IT staff are not here. I imagine El Reg Towers is the hangout of old greybeards who remember the site from the early days , when it was fun , and not 95% serious news about corporate buyouts etc. People who lament the retirement of dusty sites like www.ntk.net
Them young 'uns probly do their IT networking / meme sharing on snapchat or whatever it is they use nowadays
hmm , doesent seem to be an "angry old man shouting at clouds" icon ironically
If I had to guess I'd say the majority of those IT staff are not here. I imagine El Reg Towers is the hangout of old greybeards who remember the site from the early days , when it was fun , and not 95% serious news about corporate buyouts etc. People who lament the retirement of dusty sites like www.ntk.net
Some of us date back to ASR 33s and punched card decks, never mind this new-fangled web stuff. [Anyway NTK was an email newsletter first. And is still missed.]
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.
They started off (mechanical) as variable resistors, spun by a ball.
Before changing to (opti-mechanical) the LED shining through slots that you've mentioned, again spun by a ball.
Finally becoming (optical) the mice you know today, where a camera is watching a surface slide under the mouse.
Multi-turn and endless (looping) variable resistors exist. Somewhat specialist items now though - modern multi-turn resistors are generally for precise trimming so are intentionally stiff.
Add a stable voltage supply and ADC, and you've got an absolute (multiturn) or relative (endless) mouse.
I also remember "pointer on a stick" digitizers that used single turn pots to find the absolute location of the pointer.
They are called "trackballs" and have been around almost as long as mice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball
I remember playing Missile Command in the arcade when at school which had a trackball - that was in the 1980's
https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/missile-command
Upvote for Missile Command reference.
I was one of the best players at the arcade I frequented (always at or close to the top of the top 10) until one day one I came in and saw someone new clock (roll the score counter over it's highest value back to zero) one of the two systems, and after what seemed like hours, walk away from the game, having stacked extra bases up right across the bottom of the screen, when he got bored!
That somewhat spoiled the game for me, as I would never, ever have become that good, and I stopped playing (that and most other arcade video games as well), and returned to playing pinball.
Even the old BBC micro had a trackball - the main other one I used after Missile Command:
https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=61
Ye olde Marconi RB2!
Trackballs are great alternative pointing devices to mice when there was very limited desk space or mice were plainly impractical - such as radar and military applications.
https://www.trackballmouse.org/trackball-mouse-aviation-military/
https://www.nsi-be.com/markets/marine
Mice have an unfortunate habbit of "rolling off the desk" during combat operations at sea - especially at critical moments.
I can't remember where I came across it (or if I may still have it somewhere) but I once encountered a ball mouse with entirely electromechanical quadrature detectors - the principle was the same as the "slotted disc" optical type but they had little round PCBs with radial stripes of copper which pressed against springy wipers.
It wasn't terribly reliable and didn't track very well either, probably because of the relatively high torque that was required to turn the rollers.
Admittedly it's a long long time since i last had to use a mechanical mouse. Though I do remember the time I saw a friend having to move his mouse across his desk, lift it and move it back to the other side, then move it across the desk again, and so on. I popped off the bottom and the entire inside of the mouse was stuffed with crud. Picked it all out, cleaned the rollers, and all was good. Apart from he'd been using his mouse like that for so long he took a while to adjust back to using it normally!
I did have a mouse once which had a small scroll-ball in the top for scrolling around a page in all directions. Fine, but that soon crudded up to the point where it became unusable and was hard to get at to clean where the little connection film snapped.
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.
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.
Oops! I usually (aka always except on planes) carry a Leatherman Wave on my belt and have done for mumble years (lost in the mists of time/dodgy memory).
No officer, it's not a knife, it's a multitool. Totally different. Do you know how many times I've had to fix sink plug mechanisms when on holiday???
I got a Leatherman Super Tool about 25 years ago, having carried a Victorinox daily before then. The Leatherman's steel was so much better I put the Victorinox in a drawer and forgot about it. Still carrying that Leatherman anywhere I go.
About 20 years ago I visited London on vacation. Got some odd looks while doing woodcarving in Hyde Park. Being leftpondian, it didn't even occur to me that knives might be illegal; found out several years later.
Meanwhile, my state legalized ALL knives a few years back. I can legally carry a switchblade or a sword in public. My EDC is a locking blade that's quite usable for opening boxes or gutting some asshat if I don't feel like pulling out the 9 that I can also legally carry in public.
I'm more of a fan of the Gerber than the Leatherman. Slide-out pliers are more convenient than flip-around.
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.
I used to have a special cleaning brush for the task. It was shaped like a bog-brush, and was the same diameter as the mouse ball.
Ball out, brush in, rotate and wiggle, ball back in, lecture user about not eating at their desk and practicing basic personal hygiene.
The good old days ... or maybe not.
>Is it weird that I miss the days of cleaning the lint out of my mouse and ball?
Absolutely not. My daily driver is a mechanical Logitech USB mouse which to the best of my (ever-fading) recollection is about 25 years old. Every month or so it gets a bit sticky, so I spend an enjoyable and meditative 20 minutes or so completely disassembling it and cleaning its innards. (No poking about in the ball-holder (scrotum?) to clean the rollers, needs doing properly.)
At the same time I also give my mouse mat a scrub - it designed and manufactured by my own company in about 1990, with no built-in obsolescence.
If it aint broke.... drink to it! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
(Comments here about greybeards and old gits may very well be pertinent.)
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.
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.
Someone complained about an issue with one of the office printers the other day. Just as a quick check I asked out to general open plan area if anyone else was having the same issue (ie general print serverr fault or just this one persons account) and at least three people said "What printer?" or "We have a printer?" :-)
I work at a secondary school and, despite using Google Classroom/Microsoft Online for lots of things, we still print about 2x106 sheets per year.
Dunno what the teachers find to print, but they go at it like there is no tomorrow - Science department are the biggest paper users.
Schools will be the last to stop printing. They probably never will.
Individual worksheets that the kids can scribble on serves a much greater purpose than merely the content on them.
Handwriting - and simply using a pencil - is a skill everyone needs but requires huge amounts of practice to become even vaguely competent.
If the class has 30 kids, pretty much every lesson will need at least 64 sheets of printed material - write between the lines, colour in the cat.
Take it home to show the parents, and do it there too. Not to mention when they change maths. Why do they change maths? Maths is maths!
My guess, born of decades in education, is partly that a) teachers always print off a few extra copies b) other teachers in the department all print off a set for their own classes, even though the first teacher had printed enough for the whole year group and c) half the time they forget they printed the things and either they go stray after being left on the coper for three days or they simply printed them again anyway.
I work in a similar role, and this university has a similar-sounding networked printing setup (for all I know, you could well be one of my colleagues, fellow AC!).
Similarly, I very rarely print anything: very very occasionally if I need to try to debug or modify someone else's (or even my own) code in some grown-too-large script that was "needed yesterday" when written, and the debugging/modifications likewise; on some occasions it can still actually be handy to draw arrows or scribble some notes in key places on an actual print-out to help keep track of things when doing this sort of work.
The academics (scientists, in my department), on the other hand, I think still print out (almost?) as much as ever, at least where (long) academic papers are concerned, which is probably fairly reasonable, as they similarly often want to jot notes or highlight certain sections of text. I'm sure that better markup tools in PDF readers (and growing use of tablets (mostly iPads, of course, that research grant funding isn't entirely going to spend itself(!)) for reading) do probably help to reduce the amount of printing at least a bit, however.
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 ...
The fun thing about SUN and mice is that they had optical mice almost from the begining ( ok, they required the mirror mat and that said mirror mat was oriented so you could read the SUN Microsystem brand without being a contorsionist ), then when optical mice started to appear everywhere else, they moved to ball mice ( in the mid/late 90s ), and moved back to optical /sans mat/ before they got gobbled by Oracle and disappeared.
Data General (I worked there) had an MV4000 based graphical workstation (GW4000?) that had the processor, keyboard and Trinitron CRT built into a V shaped desk...maybe that was it? We used them briefly for DG's home-grown schematic CAD until DG decided to go with Sun workstations and VIEWlogic software.
"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 ..."
Could she walk without watching her feet? Or drive without staring constantly at the steering wheel?
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.
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.
That's nothing! I used to work for a company run by a truly evil bastard. One of our small acts of revenge was to put the mouse on the left hand side of his keyboard. Said bastard was clueless about anything IT. And right-handed. It took Dr. Evil several months to figure out putting the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard greatly enhanced his UX. Tech support always told him the mouse was working perfectly whenever they checked it after he'd complained. And dutifully put it back on the left hand side of his keyboard.
Way back in the late 80s I managed to annoy a left-handed user. I was sorting a relatively minor issue for him and, as the mouse was on the left, I just used it that way even though I'm right handed.
The annoyance was 'cause he reckoned I was better with the mouse in my non-dominant hand than he was with his dominant one! All down to practice of course.
I've said it here a few times, I'm kind of ambidextrous*, right side is dominant, but the left hand sometimes says "Here that's easier for me to do, than for you to do, I'll take it from here".
*This would explain why as a kid I hated games that involved catching a ball, as my hands were usually in conflict as to which one to use.
Me too. Ambistdexterous to the point that as a kid they used an ECG machine to decide which was my dominant side. I use the mouse on the right, because that's where it is and I'm used to it. Just switched to the left, feels kind of weird But it works OK. Remembering which button is which may take a bit longer because the index finger is on the wrong one.Probably not worth messing with that. I'll go back to the usual way.
I hate using mice with my left hand, but I've got no problem with using a trackpad with it.
I have one client who uses his mouse upside down. He's a dentist, says it's because he's always doing things in a mirror and it's just easier for him to use it that way.
Oddly, my other dentist clients don't do that.
I used to do a lot of manual PCB layout work, requiring almost constant use of one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse.
I loved it. Show up at the office and get a drink, set a playlist and put the headphones on, and I would get into a flow state for hours dragging and nudging lines around on the screen until I was bleary-eyed.
After two or three 8 hour days in a row, I would start to wonder if 25 was too young to be developing carpal tunnel syndrome and one of the ways I found to give my right wrist a break was to switch hands and drive the mouse with my left hand. Years later, I've made a lot of ergonomic improvements to how I use my computer, so I've probably lost the muscle memory to automatically "left click" with the middle finger and "right click" with the index finger on my left hand.
I'll have to give it a try for the rest of the day...
> It took Dr. Evil several months to figure out putting the mouse on the right hand side of the keyboard greatly enhanced his UX
I'm as right-handed as they come - and within the first day of being plunked down in front of a mouse (on a Three Rivers PERQ) I'd moved the mouse to my left hand, so that I could take notes with my right hand. And there the mouse has stayed.
To be totally honest, I've never really understood why just about everyone uses their dominant hand for the mouse - maybe you get better precision or speed when playing some video games, but for word processing, general file fiddling etc if you are struggling with the mouse it doesn't even need to be pixel precise (and graphics programs, CAD etc can just zoom in). And, of course, Real Programmers/SysOps/IT Deskers use the command line as much as possible!
The dominant hand is then free for the important tasks of note taking, doodling, dunking biscuits, holding the coffee cup - and, for a right-hander, operating the numeric keypad when typing into the timesheet spreadsheet.
Still, horses for courses, your mileage may vary, mice may go down as well as up etc etc.
Just know that, as confused as you are to see my mouse on the "wrong" side, I'm as confused by the position of your mouse - on the "wrong" side!
Hmm I’m left handed, but started out working doing autocad, that used a 12x12” digitising tablet where the puck was shaped for right handed use.
Ever since then I have used a mouse in my right hand, even when nowadays I used a touchpad for my desktop Mac.
Using one in my left hand feels odd after doing it this way for 33 years…
When I first started doing PCs with mice, I had a pre-existing desk with drawers on the left side of the user's legs, and therefore plenty of desktop space to the left, not so much to the right. So, for the first decade or so of my mouse use, I used the mouse on my left even though I was (well, and remain) right-handed. I used the approach of switching the left & right buttons as soon as I found it, rather than training myself to use the 'wrong' fingers. This persisted into my trackball use, when the trackballs were symmetrical. It doesn't work so well with the ergonomic fitted right-hand trackballs, of course.
My mother, maysherestinpeice, never go the hang of a mouse; this was back in the early 90’s, when she wanted the pointer to go up the screen she would lift it, physically, off the mouse mat. She got better as time when on, but she never lost the instinct to do that and I often watched her starting to lift the mouse up before correcting herself.
Just for once the obligatory thing isn't XKCD.
Yeah, I've taught a number of users how to mouse over the years.
But nobody ever taught me. The first time I sat down in front of a Lisa in 1983 it was just an immediate "Oh cool!" and made perfect sense.
Sadly, I didn't get to take the Lisa home then, but I did get an AppleMouse //e fairly soon after that. It was over a decade before I got a Lisa. Still have it.
> Some once said that using a mouse is only intuitive after the user has been shown how to use it...
That is pretty much true of every bit of the computer UI, especially GUIs. I ask "why do I have to click on a hamburger to get a menu?"[1], whippersnapper asks "why do I have to click on a front-loader washing machine to open a file?".
Maybe a keyboard is actually intuitive - although you still have to mash keys to see what all of them do, you can't deduce the behaviour of the SHIFT key just by looking at the keyboard, it does nothing at when you just press it, unlike the letter keys, and then ALT or CTRL are just nightmares to "intuit" what they do.
[1] as well as "Why don't clickable items have clear hit boxes around them? Why don't buttons show they are being depressed as I start to click on them?" And, of course, "Why do I have to fish around *below* the bottom border of a window to grab that border, what was wrong with just clicking *on* the border?". Don't get me started on 'phone UIs!
When I was starting out as a intern architect, I was one of the young bucks at the firm with a cad workstation. Early in my tenure there, an older Architect, who I was drafting for, sat down with me to go over some of the drawing details...
First, he tried to redline the changes he wanted, by drawing on the screen.
Second, he was a bit hot under the collar, when on one detail, I zoomed out(or in, a bit hazy) and he was upset that I had changed the detail scale and messed up the drawing.
It took a few minutes of explaining how CAD worked in comparison to hand drafting. He was smart enough to know that CAD was a useful and efficient tool, but somewhat set in his own way from an earlier era. The tech was just a bit much. :)
Back before Scott Adams ran out of ideas for Dilbert* and started recycling them, he had a strip with exactly this sort of scenario. Dogbert, working as a tech support agent, then tells the caller that they need to buy his mousepad upgrade, which is just a physically bigger mousepad.
* Not to mention going off the deep end as a racist douchebag
Depends.
Had fairly long chats with a couple of my favourite comedians (Doug Stanhope & Mark Steel) & both were decent blokes *
* I'm not some weird stan, Stanhope was when fire alarm went off in a building and chatted as stood next to each other outside waiting to get back in, Steel was in (almost) interminable queues at airport when he was off to Gib to record an "In Town" & by chance I was next to him in the queue.
I was called out to a mouse pointer moving erratically on a user's screen even when the mouse was stationary. This had been an intermittent problem for some time and had left our small group of techies confused as by the time we arrived it was always behaving normally again. As anticipated, the mouse and pointer were functioning as expected.
I checked and cleaned the rollers and cleaned the ball, had a good rummage in the innards and de-fluffed the troublesome mouse; all the usual things to resolve these sorts of problems. Replaced the ball cover and tried the mouse again - still working normally. I was about to leave and the user called me back, "it's doing it again!". At least now i could witness the pointer moving across the screen of it's own accord.
Then it suddenly stopped ... at the same time as the sun - shining through the nearby window and onto the desk - went behind a cloud. Seemed like a coincidence, so we waited for the cloud to move away and once again the pointer started drifting across the screen as the sun again bathed the mouse in light. I guessed the light was getting in through the only gap in the bodywork of the mouse - between the mouse buttons - and when covered, it stopped the errant pointer in it's tracks. It turned out the design of this particular mouse meant light was getting in, shining through the sensor spokes of the rollers, tricking the mouse into thinking the rollers were moving.
I lowered the window blinds and (jokingly) forbade the user to lift the blinds again until I could locate a suitable replacement mouse that was compatible with natural daylight.
The engineer or achitect may have been familiar with a device of the time called a 'digitiser'. In a manner somewhat similar to a mouse, it's used to precisely click points on a 2D surface for digitising physical drawings. And the coordiates are absolute in relation to the digitiser surface, not relative like a mouse. This may have led to the confusion!
> never seen a digitiser tablet with a puck
Tell them to watch the Stargate film and explain that you could also move those cross-hairs manually around the big star map (after the MALP vanishes, around 3 min 10 secs)
Used a digitiser with puck briefly in the late 1960s. A serious bit of kit operated by a specially trained guy who let me have a go. IIRC the movement of puck was mirrored by a detector on the other side of the working surface which was "connected" to the puck by a strong magnet, I think the position was "read" by potentiometers.
> proceeded to roll the ball around with his finger
Very sensible, use the skills learnt in the video arcade.
(Why don't we use trackballs more? Ought to get mine out again, it was easier to use on desk too cluttered for a mousepad after all, and that does seem to be the normal state of my desk these days! Guess I too got suckered in by Big Mouse and neglected the alternatives)
Many complaints about the Apple(ple(tm)Magic(tm)Mouse(tm)(tm) was that the ball would only scroll on one axis, rather than the two as advertised. One of the best ways to clean gunk for the apple(tm)Magic(tm)Mouse(tm)(tm) is to unplug mouse. Find clean piece of A4 or Letter. Turn mouse over and rub the ball (surprised not trademarked, copyrighted or some other form of registration) around the paper. When no further tracks appear, turn mouse with ball to face upwards. Reconnect
The amount of embedded debris left on the sacrificial sheet was proof of the effectiveness of the method, and once again, hand hygiene was key or the next viral/bacterial vector would be due to unclean mouse balls.
Seriously, this is one of a set of standard stories that surface from time to time. Along with "something pressing on the keyboard", "wireless keyboard in cupboard going nuts", "part of anatomy resting on keyboard", "wireless mouse swap", "magnetic jewelry" and that old, possibly obsolete one, "water dripping from pot plants onto monitor" (modern flat screens having much smaller impact cross-section for falling water)
It:s as though some humans don't have any sense of feedback from the outside world. If he held the A key down and it resulted in AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA he'd lodge a service call. If he turned a doorhandle upwards and the door didn't open, he'd lodge a service call. How can you not notice movement of a mouse moves the pointer regardless of where the mouse is? How has he completely failed to notice, dunno, nudging the mouse with his wrist, picking it up and putting it back where is usually lives AND THE POINTER IS IN THE SAME PLACE! How do they manage to obtain, and hold down jobs?
I'm irritated with every new computer or new installation of an OS or having to work on someone else's computer with the default mouse cursor speed, in which dragging it halfway across your desk results in the cursor moving less than halfway across the screen. So trying to move the cursor to the upper right corner involves moving the mouse and lifting it to start at the lower left of the mouse pad again seven or eight times. (With the old mechanical mice, you could move it quickly and lift it up so the ball would keep spinning, but usually that would disengage the rollers.) Or wearing out the laptop's trackpad just trying to close one window. It's only made worse and worse as the years progress and screen resolutions get higher and higher, and God forbid you have two or more screens. Even just one notch up on the cursor speed slider is a huge help, but on my computer I move it from the default of 10 out of 20 up to 15. My wrist doesn't need to move at all to get across two screens (1440p and 1080p), although I still move the mouse to settle into a "centered" position out of habit.
The state of some of the keyboards and mice I've had to clean in recent years due to the plastering, almost artex-like of make-up (mainly foundation) shows the amount of times people touch their face during the day without washing. I've had difficulty finding a product that deals with this, and as for the old mice with balls (fnarr) I'm not sure what is worse, the flakes of skin, or the hairs of indeterminate origin means that I had to put requests in for PPE suitable for biowarfare, which were denied.
Gloves, masks and goggles possibly aren't enough, but I'm so far in a state of carrier, non-symptomatic or immune to whatever it is those nests of plague contain.
The effects of the Human Interface Devices varied, from jumps, scrolls in one direction, keys that didn't work with out deep cleaning, keys that worked intermittently.
Calls to a fruit based vendor for a makeup proof keyboard and mouse set have yet to have any kind of attention, but I live in hope
When writing historical stories about the old roller mice, you really should reference the IBM field service engineering instructions for cleaning mice balls.
Back in the day, IBM had instructions for everything - but the mice-ball cleaning instructions when viral (in as much as anything could in the 1980's) because they were hilarious when taken out of context
Ahhh, yes, mechanical mice. Back in the early 2ks, when I did an awful lot of on site domestic and small business PC repairs, cleaning those pesky balls and rollers was pretty much routine at every job, if only so I could get the mouse to be usable enough to fix the actual problem.
Running a mouse up a wall is a new one on me, but watching users zoom their mouse all the way across their desk and back again was common. And I've just remembered one guy who went so far as to nail a piece of plywood to the side of his desk for extra mouse room. Goodness, I'd forgotten about him!! Visiting Joe Public in his lair was... Interesting:)
When I use the mouse I note the pointer on the screen points "up" and to the "left". I use the mouse with my right hand (even though I'm left handed). One time I was working on a Mac, and there was a goodie that would change the pointer to up and to the right. For the life of me that simple change would get me all flustgered and the hand-eye coordination went into the dumper. While this experiment was ongoing I tried mousing with my left hand, and fount it easier when the pointer was in the other (up-right) orientation.
Go figure! Sometimes the error exists between the chair and the mouse :-)
I had the opposite....
(~mid-90s) I used to part-time tutorial a CAD class for our 3rd year students. An in the computer lab about 5-10 PCs had a tablet attached, and the number of times I'd get a student saying "if I pick up the mouse and put it down, the cursor snaps to that position on the screen"
I supported multiple University computer labs in the early 2000s..
This was about the time when ball mice were still a thing, and optical mice were an expensive replacement. Even though the ball mice were cheap even then they were less than £5, we still had a problem with theft. As such cable tied the mice and keyboards to the desk. We also had a problem with ball theft. IIRC, we eventually decided to glue the doors shut, but even that didn't always stop the thieves who would, in some cases, happily destroy the casing to get the ball.
Before we did the glueing, however, I got a report of a mouse theft in one of the labs. I went to the lab fully expecting to see a mouse with a missing ball.
I did not. A student had stolen the entire mouse, but instead of doing the sensible thing, and cutting the cable tie, they cut through the mouse cable, leaving it plugged into the USB socket. How do I know this? The plug was still plugged into the USB socket on the PC..
Had the same problem with a customer who wasn't very good with his fine motoric sills.
He kept pushing the mouse a foot and a half in each direction, complaining that he had already cleaned out 60% of his desk to have enough space for that. And then looked at me like a deer in the headlights when I showed him how to move it with rather short, but faster movements in a space the equivalent of an A5 sheet of paper. He had already wondered why that mouse pad he got with the system was so small... ;-)
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