The real BIFL part about these is that the externals are 3d-printed with open-source files, so if they ever wear out you can easily print new components, and the trackballs are standard snooker balls, also easily replaceable. They’re great.

That’s an incredible name.

Very cool! Not easily available here in Europe, though… Or at least some very steep import costs. Bit too much for me, at least.

Shame, this is the suggestion I’m most enthused by.

Even if they were able to last that long, I wouldn’t recommend that someone try to buy it – or any other PC component – for life. Technology advances.

In 1984, if you had a Mac, your mouse probably interfaced via the Mac’s dedicated mouse port. That became obsolete a couple models down the line, replaced by Apple Desktop Bus.

If you had a DOS PC, you probably had a (checks) RS-232 port. That was replaced by the PS/2 port.

Then both got replaced by USB.

Now, USB-A plugs are on the way out, being replaced by USB-C.

I know that at least ADB was not – as USB is – designed to be electrically safe to unplug and plug in while the computer was active. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same were true of other ports as well.

A Mac mouse would have one button, a PC mouse probably two. There would be no scroll wheel. Mice have since acquired a scroll wheel, and that scroll wheel has become clickable (and sometimes tiltable). My current mouse has five buttons, includes a forward and back button; that’s not universal but also isn’t uncommon today.

They used a mechanical ball and electro-optical encoders. These could gum up with hand oil and dead skin and such and would need to be cleaned. Now most mice use a CCD to detect motion, and the current ones are a lot better then the early ones, which would occasionally “twitch” around a bit.

I don’t know the polling rate back then, but until relatively recently, mice weren’t polled at rates capable of keeping up with many current monitors (which have gotten into 144 Hz and higher – I have a 165 Hz display, and there are 240 Hz monitors out). Both would have had a considerably lower polling rate than the thousand-plus Hz that current mice can typically report their position.

Resolution is also much higher.

And some people – I’m not in this camp myself – really want wireless mice. That wasn’t available until recently, and only really standardized in the form of Bluetooth pretty recently.

Point is, even if one could get mouse switches that would last a lifetime, one probably doesn’t want to do so. The technology isn’t mature enough for things to be holding in place, for a mouse made even relatively-recently to be technically comparable to current mice.

You can always just not use them but I’ve found the buttons on top incredibly useful as an undo/redo pair and makes working in anything so much nicer.

The “two extra” buttons seem to have been mostly used for “forward/back”.

I use a tiling window manager in Linux these days, so I don’t drag windows, but back when I was using a non-tiling window manager last, I set up one mouse button to be “drag window” in my window manager, so that one could just grab a window anywhere rather than on the title bar to move it. That was definitely convenient, and I’d bet that there’s a way to accomplish that in other windowing environments as well.

Are you able to open it up and clean the parts around the scroll wheel? You’d be surprised how much crap accumulates there!

I can, and I have! Maybe I should try a little bit harder, though. I used some contact cleaner spray and that did seem to help for a little while, but now the problem is starting to come back.

That one’s been mentioned a couple times here, I’ll have to check it out! A wired mouse has always appealed to me less—my setup doesn’t really need it and it’s just one more thing that could break. But maybe there’s a wired version?