Museum of old computer mice

Originally published at: Museum of old computer mice | Boing Boing

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I hope they include a hall of shame dedicated to Apple mice. That department just seems to draw in bad industrial designers.

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Am I really the kind of person to have “favorite” computer mice? Yes, yes i am!

My favorite design is probably the Atari ST mouse. Maybe not as nice to use as some, but there’s something about the aesthetics of it that really speak to me:

My favorite for feel is the Logitech C7. It maybe isn’t the best mouse ever but the crisp tick-tick of the microswitch based buttons just always made it feel like such a premium mouse to me.
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The one I have spent the most time using and is my default nowadays is not really my favorite, it just works well enough. That’s adulthood, I guess.

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Missing the 3-button Acorn Archimedes mouse!

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My first mouse was the green-eyed Microsoft mouse.

We used it for a graphics editor on our prototype 68000 arcade game system. The mouse connected to a PC clone, running the graphics editor in Turbo Pascal, talking to the prototype hardware through a parallel port.

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“sigh”

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Mine has to be the Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. It’s almost unique in being fully ambidextrous with perfectly-located shoulder buttons.
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This one, which doesn’t work with current operating systems. I was sad when it became “no longer supported.”

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The curator of the museum insists on writing “mouses”.

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I agonized over this myself, ultimately going for what the AP does (though it’s not in the styleguide)

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Screen Shot 2021-10-11 at 21.28.53

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I miss my Logitech C7. I programmed lots of chording macros for the extra buttons before Windows. New PCs came and went, but I kept using it until I didn’t have a serial port to plug it into.

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My fav mouse looked more like a black and silver scarab than anything else. It was the first wireless critter we had, and I adored it. It was more comfortable to use than any other I’ve tried until now. It had five buttons, so no faffing about going up to click on the browser’s forward and back “buttons.” Wish I could find a pic. It sure ate up the batteries tho, even when I took 'em out whenever I turned off the machine. It came as a set w/a wired multimedia keyboard, and I fell in love w/it, too. Volume up, down and mute; f-fwd, “rewind,” pause, stop; reload buttons. So convenient. Pretty sure it was a Logitech set. Late 90s - V early 2000.

I’m V happy w/my current black and silver five-button mouse:


Got 5 of 'em for around $20 from ebay. They have a V nice rubbery “skin” on the sides. They work V well left-handed, too. The box says they work w/systems up to XP (!!!) but the seller assures me they work fine for everything including 10.

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The ADB mouse. Came out with the Apple IIGS, and later the Mac SE and Mac II.

I think Apple makes horrible mice. I’m using a Corsair Harpoon RGB Pro with my mac.

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^ My first mouse. Good memories playing Cairo, Crystal Quest and Scarab of Ra!

Personal favorite, and still in use:

Been using one of these for over 20 years now (this particular example is something like 12 years old I think?). Two years ago I decided to replace the guts of this thing with a Teensy microcontroller because Kensington finally dropped support for it in their driver suite. :man_facepalming:

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My first mouse was this:

My family upgraded the IIe into a ][GS, and kept the old style mouse. Unfortunately, this was incompatible with the vitally important

so we ended up getting the ADB mouse anyway

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Some real mouse connoisseurs in this thread!

I had one of these!

One of these too!

I had one of these too! I’m surprised that it stopped working - I’d expect any USB mouse to work right back to the dawn of the standard.

My current mouse is a Logitech gamer one with a lot of silly features, but it’s as ambidextrous as the intellimouse (the shoulder buttons are detachable, held on by magnets, and I could even have them on both sides, though I’m not sure how easy they’d be to press with my little finger)

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