Hey y’all remember when mice had balls in them? turns to dust
I was just thinking this the other day. I also remember that you had to open the mouse to clean it because the little internal rollers got tangled in grossness.
And the balls in the mice at school would get thrown around the room/lost/stolen until the computer teachers glued them shut so you couldn’t clean the rollers and it was almost impossible to use them
They had that softness that made them feel harmless, but their weight was unmistakably dangerous.
Administering a school where there were no computer mice (but were computers)… Is there a picture for that?
Wait, there weren’t mice on any our Apple II in my elementary school’s computer room.
Or keyboard plugs for that matter. Welcome to my crypt I guess.
Hey, that’s exactly the computers I was talking about. The IIe, and students playing where in the world is Carmen Santiago, logo writer etc.
I used to refer to this as “cleaning the ball cavity.”
Our first mouse plugged into the serial port with a pass-through connector so you could still use the modem. There was a power adapter that plugged in there, too. Then you had to load the driver for the few programs that used it… though I think it also had a mode where it would work on a text screen, since so few program supported it. We didn’t use it much.
This would have been on our IBM PC XT clone in the early 90s with 512k of RAM and a 5.25" floppy drive for storage. I don’t think we used it with the PCjr we had before that, but I don’t remember.
You were doing what with mouse balls?! Why would you even have those near your computer? even older dust
And having to clean those rollers…
This old.
“Coaxial mouse old” isn’t a thing, gramps. I hate to tell you, but the senility’s kicking in…
It was to hook up cable TV to a TV that only had UHF/VHF.
Our TV gathunka knob didn’t even have UHF.
We had these too, I understood it.
Yo for my NES yeaboyee
devil horns
I’m no-keyboard-and-mouse-connector-at-all-because-keyboard-is-built-into-the-computer-and-mice-aren’t-a-thing old.
My Apple ][ Plus was like that.
iPad?
T-1000 ?
C64
ZX Spectrum +3
Atari 800.
I had the atari 130xe!!!
The C64 could use a special (non-RS232) 9 pin D connector mouse, it worked for playing a breakout clone and nothing else (even Geos, the one place a mouse would have been actually useful!)
I feel attacked
Apparently some of us are older than even the corpse…no mouse gang here.
I got your VAX/VMS right here homie! (PTSD ensues)
I think we were.
8088 represent. 640kb should be enough for everyone.
deleted by creator
640kb, what are you a millionaire?
Motorola gang
“Press play on tape”
load, "
Wrrrrr
Huh. Toslink is in quotes like it’s a coliquialism, but it’s the actual name for that port.
Maybe because it’s sort of a brand name?
Maybe? Or the creator might not have known it was the actual name since it looks like a brand name.
Jesus I’ve used every port on this image. I’m gonna go order my casket now before it’s too late.
SP/DIF can’t hurt you, SP/DIF doesn’t exist
They’re missing the BNC connector. Our lab has equipment that still uses them to plug in test probes.
Once I used a Mac serial cable to network 2 Macs directly together (classic Mac OS 9) so that I could play Marathon multiplayer mode with my brother. It worked and it was rad. 90s LAN party of 2
You mean AppleTalk?
Lol listing adb and svideo differently
They used the same shape but transmitted very different data. ADB was for peripherals, like mouse and keyboard
This picture was around when people using PCs would know what a ps/2 connector was. I’m not sure if the fact it calls usb3 future, ages the picture or makes me feel old for knowing a time before usb3.
A time before… 2008???
DIN-5 was a dope connector. No bent pins, stuck in there sturdy, you could rotate it until you got it with no guessing, no wimpy cable breaking off.
Still is! I rock many DIN-5 cables in my home studio for MIDI. You’re not joking when you say “you could rotate it until you got it with no guessing”, I have to do that every damn time.
I had to put my HDD in park position manually.
Bottom picture isn’t even that old
RS-422 is from 1975
RS-232 was what PCs used and its from 1960.
… :(
I don’t think I’m on the chart. First computer was a RadioShack TRS-80. 4 kb of RAM, but I upgraded to a blazing 8 kb. Yee-haw! No floppy discs: my programs were saved on cassette tape using a cassette recorder connected to the computer. Those were the days.
You had a TRASH-80?!? Amazing. I only got to play star trek on one at school.
This was me but with the Commodore Vic 20.
Yah, and we had to wipe out the ram to load the program back in from the tape. And sometimes the volume wasn’t set perfectly in the cassette player, so you lost all your work.
Good times?
Member when you edited your
himem.sysconfig.sys and autoexec.bat to play your game?Remember when you had to navigate through DOS to start your game?
Remember when you had to make boot disks for games?
Remember when you needed a cassette tape for games?
Remember when you had to find a stick for stick and hoop?
Ug ug ooga ooga? Ug ug!
Remember when you had a quickload cartridge in the expansion slot but not every game would be able to use it? And when you blew the video card pulling the keyboard too hard since they were all hot connections? I still haven’t fixed that.
Ahh the good old days when you had to flip dip switches on expansion cards to avoid IRQ and address conflicts.
Freaking sound cards sucked back then.
Config.sys actually. Himem was a line in the config.sys file.
Oh, fuck. Right. config.sys! I’ll return my old fart medal right away, sir.
Rude
I feel attacked
In my day, the keyboard was the computer!
Time to get a Raspberry Pi 400 to get that feeling back!
Raspberry pi 400 gang?
Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3
128KB RAM, Z80 CPU, floppy disk drive.
Amstrad CPC-464 with integrated tape deck AND colour monitor.
Get on my level, baby!
I had a Coleco Adam so I might be close. I had to look up the Amstrad and that does look sweet. I upgraded to a C128 that did have a z80!!
Ok damn I feel old now.
Our first mobile PC was a Compaq Luggable.
Thing had two 5 1/4" floppy drives, a 4 Mhz processor, an 8" monochrome green monitor, and weighed 30 pounds. The keyboard was the lid that covered the screen and the drives.
We eventually upgraded it to have a 10 meg hard drive instead of one of the floppies.
Let’s be real, usb-a is ancient now.
to be fair, Matt Damon ain’t getting any younger
Yeah it seems like USB-C is overtaking A in a lot of applications
It’s a beautiful thing!
Still widely used
