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Overcooled egg is yum gum.
how about having to glue the bottom on hundreds of mice so school kids dont steal/throw them at each other.
Were you the admins at my grade school? Because I may or may not have been responsible for that…
core memory unlocked
also using hard drive magnet to discolour CRT screens
And the satisfaction of a good degauss afterwards
yeah that button was a game changer, honestly wouldn’t even bother if the school had those.
We had to rub them face down on the carpet to get them somewhere close to normal.
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.
Not it. Thanks though.
Got a link to what you’re looking for?
jaybone figured it out in a comment right above this, and won the bounty.
It was actually called Chopper Commando.
Unfortunately no, this is way too advanced. Thanks for trying though.
Just go with the better C64 Choplifter!
Is that the one where you would land and wait for these little guys to run into your helicopter, then you had to fly back to base and drop them off? As someone else mentioned that sounds like choplifter on C64. Also reminds me of a really great old school WW2 fighter plane side scroller. I can’t think of the name, but it was made by a company called broaderbund or something.
You might be thinking of Jungle Strike, which was awesome, but on Sega Genesis.
CHOPPER was extremely basic but so well done. I’ve never had a chance to use a C64.
Desert strike?
No, but I love all three strike games. There’s a new one coming out and I’m excited!
This was Choplifter, which ran on C64 and Apple IIe. I imagine it also had an 8086/8088 PC version. Not sure if that’s what you mean by “IBM”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9D4KPjAIms
I do see something called Chopper Commando. Is that what you are thinking of?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWSQ2tph5Fc
The other side-scroller I mention above was called Wings of Fury. Also on Apple II and later on 80x86. Whenever I think of Choplifter I always think of this next.
Holy shit you got it! Chopper Commando is the one! You won the bounty - PM incoming. The others look fun by the way.
Wings of Fury looks intense. I’m going to try to emulate all of these. Maybe even try to get a controller working for them.
Oh damn! Shoplifter! I remember that!
screenshot of desktop as desktop, hide icons. simple times.
Ctrl + Alt + Arrow key
Inverting screens for lulz
Some kids did that here too, but the effect was more fun and immediate because we’re on 240 volts.
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.
I read that lead, gotta finish my coffee…
You’re all liars because no one has mentioned the smell.
Use common sense! You think nerds changed their egg out on time?
I worked for a computer store in the 90’s. The owner got the contract for all the PC’s in that part of the state in schools. One school was constantly calling about the mice not working. We would show up and start replacement them and those little assholes would be throwing the balls out of them across the room before we finished replacing them. We started using epoxy to seal them in. They would get gummed up bit it wasn’t our problem.
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.
Are you talking Apple back in the day or Apple now? It sounds like you’re talking about Apple now. It still sucks compared to a real *nix but you can still pull up a terminal.
Apple is just overcooked Linux.
what do you mean where is the file, John? It’s saved! It’s downloaded!
My wife has an iPhone and iPad and I thought she was an idiot trying to describe what was happening when I sent her an ePub file. Turns out that’s just the way it works…
If by “us,” you mean Millennials, then yes.
anyone remember that brief period before led mice got good, where you’d have to SLAM the mouse in a direction to get it to comply?
Rubber mice, that was a given sometimes, but led mice had the same issue for a bit
Yes exactly this, though I’m not sure if it was just a habit from using rubber mice
Not sure I’ve experienced that, early led mouse always seemed to fail to track at the speeds I like to swipe.
hence the slamming!
It feels more like moving at a snails pace for me, any faster made them lose track
I always thought the brown egg yolks worked best.
Not to mention scraping all the gunk off the rollers.
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.
lol and I thought I was bad in junior high.
Oh, the “hand cheese”
All the human slime is just between the buttons now and never gets cleaned
Lies.
I clean it every two years!
It was always so satisfying to get it off in one single strip
we always sprinkled paprika on ours.
Mine were so overcooked, they tasted like cooked rubber :(
I used to use a stationary mouse. I had to clean it out all the time.
Isn’t that a track ball?
This meme is just wrong
An egg that large is for a trackball.
You need to hard boil a quail’s egg for a mouse.
When you’re right, you’re right.
They’re not cheaper though, due to the relative supply shortages.
I still use a trackball, so I still have to overcook egg yolks weekly.
i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.
You make good points and it’s very rational, but for some reason, having used an optical mouse for most of my life but also knowing what a trackball is like (but just not being used to one, it accounting for like 0.005% of my mouse usage or something), I just…
They must be comparing a wired track ball mouse to wireless mice.
Having used trackball mice quite a lot before optical mice became common place, I can see a good wired trackball mouse being more responsive than an optical or even wireless laser mouse, but you would have to buy a truly craptastic wired laser mouse to find a trackball mouse better. The only way I could see it even being a possibility is if your desktop is made of glossy plastic or something else that could confuse the laser.
Can’t see myself playing FPS without a trackball. You can also use lower mouse sensitivity for higher accuracy, because you can flick. If you don’t like that all the time, there’s also good old Wolfenstain Enemy Territory trick where you bind the trigger button to drop your mouse sensitivity for that easy headshot.
Lol I used to take the balls out as a prank, see how long the teacher would wiggle it and check the cable before they flipped it lol.
Or to even clean the innards of a literal computer mouse. 🤢
Scratching those little rollers took ages.
But it was so satisfying when all the dirt and dust came off and your mouse tracked like brand new again.
When I felt extra fancy, I’d even give the ball a wash. It made a world of difference in how well it would grip on the table.
Ah, the amount of pubic hair and dried cum that got scraped off those by teenage boys, the memories.
😶
