how about having to glue the bottom on hundreds of mice so school kids dont steal/throw them at each other.
core memory unlocked
also using hard drive magnet to discolour CRT screens
Back in the day we would prank each other by flipping the 120\240 switch on each other’s computers so that they wouldn’t turn on. That kept going until someone did it one too many times and freed the foul smelling machine spirit.
So anyone feel free to disbelieve, but me and a friend ran our elementary school’s IBM network when we were 12. I don’t know the proper name for it, but it was a bunch of dumb terminals (CRT displays) with keyboard hooked up to an actual computer I never knew the physical location of. We were able to fix any problems just by fucking around with it, it was a simple system, and the school didn’t have to pay a tech to come out. So we had admin password. We used to play hacker games starting at the same time trying to knock each other off the network and change passwords fast enough. We could see who was logged in and a few shitty kids had their terminals just lock up somehow so they had to start over. Womp womp.
There were a few games on there that weren’t educational. They weren’t accessible without at least supervisor password so you could get terminal access.
I’ll pay a bounty to anyone who can get a proper executable of IBM CHOPPER that will work on Windows. I’ve searched before and I can’t get it. That game was so fucking fun. It’s a sidescroller helicopter combat game with 8 bit colors, played with a keyboard. $100 bucks to anyone who can get me a working copy or good emulation.
Edit- jaybone figured it out and won the bounty! It was Chopper Commando.
Not to mention scraping all the gunk off the rollers.
All the human slime is just between the buttons now and never gets cleaned
I was working in a facility with about 400 desktops when we made the move to laser mice. I remember it fondly. Cleaning was worse than the theft, but both were obnoxious.
Oh god we were such shits in junior high. Throwing them was great fun because they hurt like hell. I witnessed a kid throw one out a window and crack the shit out of a teacher’s windshield. Why they never just put short flathead screws in I’ll never know, that would be my solution.
You got me nostalgic thinking of junior high. If there was a hell I’d never redeem myself through good deeds. We’d pack bags full of lunch food and drop them 4 floors down the stairwell where they would explode spectacularly. We got our milk in bags, so we would strategically place them around the school to rot. They got so swollen it was outrageous. When they popped it was like a grenade of putrid stink, about two or three weeks later. If you wanted one to pop faster you could hide it behind a radiator. Projectiles made of paper clips that would legit fuck you up when fired from rubber bands the right way. You could also bite the corner off the milk bag and throw it like a grenade. Oh man and you could put like a carrot or mashed potatoes or beans into a corner of the milk bag and smash a fist on top to shotgun it everywhere. Milk bags were versatile.
I was a piece of shit, but this was what I got up to while being severely bullied, there were worse kids.
I gave my technically illiterate father a led mouse for Christmas just as they became the normal, and it was like a miracle to him.
You’re all liars because no one has mentioned the smell.
Use common sense! You think nerds changed their egg out on time?
I remember being in 4-5th grade and learning about graphs. Specifically x & y coordinates. One day while cleaning the mouse ball before playing Joust or whatnot I noticed two little geared spindle thingy’s. I vividly remember it clicking that those gears were translating the physical mouses x&y to the screens cursor’s x&y.
this is how most of us learned computer right? You want to play something, it doesnt work or only partialy so you open it up and learned how to fix shit.
That’s my problem with Apple. They hide all files, treating is as a magic box with an incredible search function. But it prevents the user from understanding, and thus learning.
