Anybody remember the brief era when kids would steal school computer mouse balls?

We had to flip the mouses around at the end of every computer class so the teacher could check all the mouse balls were still there.
- Yup. I was a nerd who got to go inside and boot up the computers and set them back from what the kids had done the day before every morning. Warning sounds with SNL skits were popular at one point, as was messing with the icons.
  It was instead of standing outside in the cold wet concrete courtyard for 20 minutes before the first bell.
  First job was turning the mouses back over (the were left balls up at the end of each class).
  
  Out go to prank was a shut down bat file, disguised as GTA.exe. We used to put that in a shared folder and waited for other students to shut down their computers.

Yep. We took them out because we thought they would bounce (they did not). But they were hard AF so we'd just throw them at each other during recess.

My library made us take the balls out and give them to the librarian when we were done with the computer.
We used to huck em at each other's nuts
- We used to huck em at each other's nuts
  Never change, kids
  
  There are no winners in a game of Ball Ball
- Turns out you could use an xacto and carve the rubber coating off and the steel ball was a perfect fit for a paintball gun. No winners had there.
  
  Jesus, could that actually kill someone?

No but i had a habit of cleaning the lint and gunk off the rollers of every mouse i touched
- The best was when you got a “full peel” from a really dirty wheel without it breaking into pieces.
- Doing God's work!

i was on the other side.. i'd spend the first five minutes scraping all the finger shit off of the rollers every day.
- I forgot all about scraping those little rollers with my fingernail! It was strangely satisfying.
  
  and super gross when you think about it..

For us it was putting a space in the username field of the login screen, and then moving the cursor back to the start of the field.
The username field wouldn't reset on a failed login attempt, only the password field did. So users would do a visual scan of the username field, confirm that's correct, assume they miskeyed when entering their password, try again, rinse and repeat.
That and rotating the desktop, switching the keyboard to Dvorak, etc
- That's a good one.
  We used to screenshot desktops, set it as the wallpaper, and move all the desktop icons to a temporary folder.
  I've heard swapping the N and M keys is a good one because it doesn't register as unusual on a visual scan but messes up touch typists.
  
  I remember the teacher calling out "I cant see your screen" constantly and for unfair reasons, on chromeOS you can (frequently on accedent) abuse the security systems made to limit the damage of rouge extensions. Mainly the "no screen sharing on chrome:// and file:// tabs pages". I also found a glitch that got patched to run the browser part on a higher privlaged UID (possably root? somthing related to OOBE? the lock screen itself? IDK). It was unstable, dangerous for the OS itself and could go to any site you wanted, this account had a blank chrome://policy and no extensions so anything was fair game. That got patched fast tho. My small group of friends still got to keep their chrome://flags changes even after the patch.

In my school, the teacher's computer had software running to remotely control the student's computers, lock them or see a mosaic of all the student screens to make sure they are doing what they should be doing.
Except, the computers were all run with admin rights and you could just open the task manager, kill a couple processes, and the remove software didn't work.
We always said it just must have been buggy software.
Sorry Mr. W. You were one of my favorite teachers, but that secret had to be kept a close secret between students

We didn't steal the balls, but where computers were back to back we'd swap the mice over. Cue much confusion for the next class when the pointer seemed to move on it's own. Fun times.
- At one of my jobs a guy ran the speaker wires from the adjoining cubicle in and out of his own computer so he could mix things into the other guy's audio, mostly music and talk radio, at very low volume so it sounded like random stray signals. Took the guy like a month to figure out what was going on.
- Worked in an office where everyone had a Macbook and wireless mouse. Getting in early and swapping some of the mice around was SOP.

I was working with some younger people a few years back and one of them noticed that all of us from of a certain generation always slam the mouse down whenever we first use it. I explained it's a reflex from when the wheels inside the mouse would get stuck with gunk and we would instinctively slam the mouse to get them free.
- Wow
  I haven't used a mouseball mouse since i was a kid but your description brought back a visceral memory of doing exactly exactly that.
- Haha holy shit, this made me realize I do that all day everyday. It really is a reflex from the 90s and serves zero purpose.
- Ouch felt that in my old bones.
  Another habit I noticed was lifting the mouse so the cursor stayed still on screen, and putting the mouse down on the edge of the mouse pad, so I could move the cursor further on the screen without going past the mouse pad.
  A quirk that's eliminated nowadays thanks to mice that can adjust dpi on the fly, but I still catch myself doing this paintbrush like motion once in awhile.

Crazy to see this in my feed, I was just thinking about this the other day. I didn’t steal the balls, but I remember figuring out that I could remove them and clean the crud off of the rolling components inside to smooth my cursor movement. (This would have been 3rd or 4th grade.)
- Kids these days will never know the satisfaction of opening the bottom, removing the ball, and then taking an unfolded paperclip to remove all the built up crud and hair on the components inside. I would do this anytime I was left alone in my mom’s office while she had a meeting or something.
  
  Youre mom probably wondered why her mouse started working smoother.
  I always keep an old toothbrush in my pencil cup for cleaning the mouse contacts. I dont use a mouse, I've always used a track ball, and now and then you have to pop out the ball and clean the accumulated crud out of the contacts.
  
  i did this everywhere i went it was so amazing
  
  Ha, it really was satisfying!

I would just open them up and tape over one of the little wheels inside, then put the ball back in.
- You can do the same thing with an optical mouse.
  https://images6.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED3/515b47490eeda.jpeg
  
  When I worked for a big IT consultant, the internal marketing department (why does that exist?) was tasked with promoting a new touch device. They had the genius idea of making stickers with "The mouse is dead" and a product link. Early one morning, they went around to every desk and put these stickers over the mouse lasers.
  It took about 30 minutes for everyone to figure out why every mouse in the building had stopped working. There was urgent work that had to be done. People were furious.

The brief era? It was over a decade of people stealing mouse balls! And once optical mice started showing up people would steal the entire mouse because they were new and cool!
- Just my own perspective lol. I was an old-school programmer before the web era, when computers were in a computer room and we used "terminals" that were just monitors with keyboards. I only had a PC and ball mouse for like 5 years before I got an optical mouse.

I definitely disabled a few school mice back in the day.
- neutered

I only did it once, because I hated the teacher and I guess I thought that would send a message. I was immediately caught and the kid who saw me pocket it kept saying I "liked mouse balls," so it really backfired pretty spectacularly.

I remember doing work experience at school in the computer lab. Thought I was gonna learn fun stuff on the servers, ended up cleaning gunk from the rollers if every mouse in the entire school (And cleaning every PC out, and flashing entire labs one by one with updates OS...)
- I worked for my district’s IT department when I was in high school. I think my sophomore or junior year.
  It was pretty cool really. Mostly it was transcoding VHS tapes into MPEGs, but occasionally I got to do odd jobs around the school district.
  Once I got yelled at by a grade school secretary, and treated with suspicion even after she had called my boss at the district IT office to confirm I was indeed there to replace a graphics card on a computer.
  While she was walking me to the library or classroom or whatever she took the box from me, pointed to the 3D orc on the box, and said in the removediest possible tone, “So what is this? Is this supposed to be part of the curriculum?”
  I calmly said, “No ma’am, that’s just the advertising the manufacturer puts on the packaging. It’s a graphics card, it can be used to play games so they advertise that.”
  “Well kids shouldn’t be playing these kinds of games in school!”
  “It’s a graphics card. It’s how the computer displays any kind of graphics on the screen. The computer needs a new one. I don’t know why, I’m just doing what I was told.”
  Man that woman was so much of a removed I remember that interaction better than most of high school.

I was in highschool at this point and I totally would have ratted any kid out for that.
No mouse balls would mean no Quake or StarCraft in the lab after school... Unacceptable!
- ... bring your own mouse. keep it in your locker. your parents are at work. your siblings are at school. it's nbd.

By the time I hit grade school the balls were outdated. So I missed out on this. What I didnt miss out on was finding a broken (exposed) usb stick and when I would plug it into a computer it would shock me a bit and the computer would shut down. I felt like I had the ultimate power in my hands

Man, that's a blast from the past! I had completely forgotten about that until I saw this post!
I wouldn't say I 'stole' them necessarily. But me and my buddies did used to take them out and hide them near the desks as a prank.

I'm bad about keeping old devices around. I have my first TNT graphics card, a Soundblaster, and several VGA cords. I do NOT have any mice around with balls. Gone the minute optical came on the scene, what an annoyance they could be.
- Yea, eff those damn balls, and I had some nice mice back then.
  I recently cleaned up several large boxes of cables, parts, etc. Found a track ball, but not a single ball mouse in there.
- A few years ago my mouse died on me and I had to dig in my tech box for a usable spare... Found a ball mouse and used it a total of five seconds before I tossed it (and the rest of them I had) and went out and bought a cheap optical instead lol
  
  It's like so many things. We were okay with what we had until something came along to vastly improve it. Internet and computer speeds, storage sizes, graphics. We did seem to forget how having good gameplay is important though in some modern games, got distracted by the eye candy.

Those balls were nasty as fuck. I remember when I was like 13 and the mouse at my dad's pc wasn't working right. A friend recommended cleaning the ball...it was disgusting.

i glued the bottom on hundreds of mice.
- Never heard of that - does it mean gluing the ball in place or what? Also why (the fuck) would you?
  
  My school used to actually glue them, as in glue the part you would remove to get access to the ball. So the mouse still worked, until enough gunk got in there that it didn't any more, then someone has a fun time trying to find the right solvent to dissolve the glue without killing the mouse.
  
  one of my first gigs was working for a school district. just gluing the little door closed so kids couldnt steal the ball.
  
  I assume that he's keeping people from opening the mice to steal the ball. Would also make it hard to clean the rollers, though...
- Can't believe I had to scroll this far to find this. Looks like my school and yours were the only two in the world where it occurred to anyone that you can just superglue the door shut to stop the little shits from thieving them.
- Kind of a dick move.

Yeap, I was one of those students, they arw super fun to just throw along the floor as they had a metal core, was heavy and went on and on forever

My school "solved" this problem by letting students use 386 with DOS, Turbo Pascal and Lotus 123 until the early 2000s, when optical mice were available.
- Jesus, I was using Turbo Pascal in the 80s. Had no idea it even still existed in 2000. Flex: I wrote my own BBS in Turbo Pascal and ran if for a couple years in Portland - Tomb of the Unknown Modem.
  
  It was still version 1.0 from 1987 or so

Nope. Way back in the day turning the brightness on a monitor completely down was the big prank. I do remember cleaning my mices balls and I did not relish that. When optical mouse came down in price I bought one for every family member.

No, when I was in school no computer had a mouse except one Mac in my English class.

If that happened today, everyone would blame TikTok.

Yeah, I always tried to use them as a pencil eraser. They were never very effective but I still always tried.

Until reading this, I had forgotten that mouse balls were even a thing.

Ooh, ooh...I did that.

Yep was one of these kids... From the very same period, removing 10base2 BNC terminators was also a fun thing to do. Both had the effect to infuriate the computer science teacher...
Thanks for the collection of all this...
(later it was the deadly loop on network hubs and tcpkill... all this is impossible now)

Today students pick keycaps off of keyboards and steal anything not tied down (so instead of just the ball, the entire mouse gets stolen). Once I heard a student ran off with an entire side panel of a computer
- The keycaps thing is a huge problem now because of the widespread use of Chromebooks with butterfly switches. 9 times out of 10 if one of those caps is torn off, the switch is permanently damaged and the whole keyboard needs to be replaced.
- Good to know every generation is progressively more enlightened than previous ones, just like I keep reading on social media. All the world's problems should be solved any day now lol.

This thread makes me wonder if there will always be a mischief factor. Even if robots do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will people still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
- Even if ~~robots~~humans do all the work and we can have anything we want for free, will ~~people~~cats still want to fuck shit up just because they can?
  
  Absolutely. If humans disappeared for two months every object in the world would be on the floor. Then cats, having fulfilled their mission, would suddenly vanish in a puff of loose hair.

Yes, yes I do remember doing that. Not just at school. Use to do it to dad. When he was being annoying sometimes.

I actually don't remember any of my school computers having ball mice. They all only got their computers in the late 90's and had optical mice by then.
But I can imagine; my high school was savage.
- Dunno if was my parents or genetics or what, but as a kid I never had the urge to do stuff like that. My impulse was make up funny stuff. The idea of breaking or ruining something seemed bad to me. So if I had gone to school in the age of computer mice I would have been pissed off if some kid disabled the mouse. It didn't bother me when my friend tricked the voice synthesizer at the science center to repeat "Fuck you, fuck you..." but I would have called him an asshole if he poured a drink into the keyboard.