My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

In the architects defence, the precursor to using a mouse for drafting was to use a digitizer. This had a fixed area which was the drafting area, plus a customisable arrangement of &#x27;buttons&#x27; around it (usually in the form of a laminated sheet stick into the digitizer board) which was the interface.<p>You could absolutely pick up the digitizer mouse and put it down into a different location on screen. It took me a bit of time to get used to drafting with a mouse after using a digitizer. It was so much less intuitive, so much less accurate, and didn&#x27;t allow you to build muscle memory.

&gt; Instead, the problem was that the architect was unaware that it was possible to pick up a mouse and relocate it without the pointer moving from its current position.<p>I am an elementary school teacher, and my students also don&#x27;t realize this! It can be surprisingly difficult to explain to the younger ones. I sometimes have to put my hand over theirs on the mouse and demonstrate the motion.

Hardest to diagnose phone support I had to deal with was an elderly relative in the DOS days trying to find another lost file....<p>&quot;type in &#x27;dir \documents&#x27; and press Enter. What comes up?&quot;.<p>&quot;Nothing&quot;.<p>&quot;Nothing at all?&quot;<p>&quot;Nothing happens&quot;.<p>After trying many variations of this, it eventually became apparent that he was pressing the Space Bar instead of the Enter key.

This article made me conscious of my use of the mouse: I realize that I move it only with a ~3cm square, which allows to reach all corners of the screen by only moving my fingers, while the base of my palm stays &quot;locked&quot; to the desk. When using multiple screens, the mouse does some quick hops to reach them, but almost never leaves that square.<p>This requires configuring the mouse to have sufficient &quot;speed&quot;. I&#x27;ve never had any musculoskeletal disorder, probably thanks to making such small moves with my hand and staying relaxed.

I remember mid-90s it was typical for a home computer to come with a prominent tutorial on mouse usage. There was definitely one for MacOS 7, while I don&#x27;t recall if there was an official Microsoft tutorial for 90s Windows or just ones provided by OEMs.

I remember in the late 80s being at the campus computer lab and telling someone to use the mouse to move the cursor, so she lifted the mouse up and pointed it where she wanted the cursor to go. Not quite Scotty in Star Trek IV, but awfully close.

I once had an elderly student in a similar situation. His solution was to lift the mouse, move the mouse mat up then move the mouse down again. It was painful to watch.

reminds me of how many users i&#x27;ve saved from headaches and eye strain by changing their CRT refresh rate from the default 60Hz to 75Hz in windows 98 or ME :)

This is a great throwback reminder of all the dirty mice I’ve cleaned. Having all that lint unevenly stuck to the rollers made the tracking of the mouse uneven. I hated it so much my default behaviour when sitting down at a computer was to start with cleaning the mouse. That usually came with a puzzled look from the owner.

This reminds me of the case of the 500 mile email.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibiblio.org&#x2F;harris&#x2F;500milemail.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibiblio.org&#x2F;harris&#x2F;500milemail.html</a>

<i>He had moved the mouse further and further on his desk to the point at which it was ascending the wall behind it</i><p>This makes me a little doubtful. He would&#x27;ve had to pick up the mouse to turn it 90 degrees to move it parallel to the wall, at which point he would&#x27;ve noticed the mouse would move without the pointer moving?<p>In those days, many mouses came with, besides drivers, a somewhat game-like tutorial program that taught people the basics of how to use them.