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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

I don't remember the mechanical mice being bad. I cleaned them every few months, not every fifteen minutes, and the cursor dragged or jumped occasionally, not constantly. For me, the laser mouse was an incremental improvement rather than the game changer this article claims. Am I the only one?

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For a long time when optical mice were first released they were garbage for any serious work for gaming. All the problems that mechanical mice had, optical mice also had - sometimes even worse. They were more fussy about the surfaces, lower resolution, even their lighter weight was less desirable for me as a gamer (at that time).

They were so mediocre that I had written them off as being gimmicky and something that would never catch on. Clearly I was proven wrong but it felt like it took a long time to reach that stage.

In hindsight it's no different to a lot of other breakthrough technologies. For example MP3 players took a few iterations before they became a viable competitor to existing portable music devices.

Oh yeah I totally remember that now too. They'd pick up all the dust on the counter/mat and freak out with low resolution spazzing.

I remember them being terrible. Every round in counter-strike I'd be yelling that it was my mouse and not my aim. The ball was so dirty!

Terrible for FPS's in the dawn of internet fragging.

I still remember trying to clean my mouse ball between rounds. The dread you feel being in CT spawn, with your ball in your hand and a T coming around the corner...

Well, the author is talking about doing artwork with a ball mouse, so the use case is definitely different than just web browsing.

But they were actually that bad. Rollers were always gunked up. Had to get the tweezers out to get it really clean, but it was useless, it just got dirty again. You couldn't actually use a mechanical mouse on a desk in a pinch without a mouse pad (at least not my desk) whereas optical mice work on any non-reflective surface. I remember the first time I got an optical mouse I used it on my upper thigh for like a whole day just because I was so amazed it could do that!

Honestly, upgrading to optical mouse was a big deal to me. I upgraded in 2002.

Optical mice also have a surprising upside, the kids used to steal the balls out of the mice in the library or computer lab, so they had to be super glued shut. Meaning they worked about as well as a mouse without a ball.

The author significantly exaggerated how often ball mice needed cleaning. I was a heavy gamer at the time and had to clean my mouse once every week or two.

It was pretty bad at university computer labs. I was forever picking lint out of those mice and scraping gunk off the rollers.

Cleaning the ball was easy - cleaning the rollers inside often took scraping them off with a q-tip or something since the gunk would build up right where it tracked the mouse ball, a partial cleaning was worse than no cleaning at all since the mouse would skip.

I never had much luck with those velcro mouse cleaning kits, I'd still end up scraping the rollers.

I never encountered a dirty mouse until I got to college in 1999. At the time I didn't understand why someone would pay so much money for an optical mouse.

I think I only cleaned my ball mouse once or twice in college, but cleaned plenty of other people's mice for them. The ball mice were so easy to clean, about as easy as filling washer fluid or putting air in a tire.

No you're not. What fails the most frequently are the microswitches, anyway.

I wonder if wireless mouse using the ball would last much longer on battery. I guess, it could. It still uses a led light internally, but I don't think it needs to be that strong.

A wireless mouse could last indefinitely, if it used magnetic resolvers instead of encoders (and siphoned off a bit of the voltage to recharge the battery.

I expect you could also make a self-powered keyboard with a coil and magnet under the spacebar...

The problem is, if you use the rollers to harvest energy, they would have higher resistance to rotation, and thus would slip even easier...

The keyboard has to remain connected when you’re not using it.

Why?

I don't recall any of the mechanical mice I've taken apart having LEDs inside them. IIRC had 3 rollers/wheels which physically touched the ball and that was what "sensed" the motion. I'm talking 90s sort of era though, so it's possible more recent mechanical mice were designed differently.

Rollers were connected to wheel with a plenty of holes, and there was a led + fotodiode that was used to detect the motion of the wheel. At least that's what I thought back then. (> 20 years, heh)

I also remember just two rollers/wheels (X/Y).

For example, this page: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/mouse2.htm says something about "optical encoding disc".

Most basic 80s and 90s mice used LEDs to track the ball, via secondary wheels. They’re tiny and don’t look like lights so you probably overlooked them.

quadrature encoders use diodes

I'd wager that how often one needed to clean the mouse varied by how often one washed their hands.

Also, I found those rare cleaning sessions to be nice cathartic breaks. But they certainly weren't every 15 minutes…

Maybe you keep your place cleaner than many of us do...?

They probably perform quite well in a dust free environment.

Let me guess that you didn't have a cat at home, did you? :)

I did. A CueCat.

Completely agree. So often when I read articles similar to this one I can't help but think of that SNL skit with the iPhone reviewers complaining about rather esoteric issues, then being confronted by the Chinese factory workers who have to labor in much worse conditions: https://youtu.be/AJJ353epH3o

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