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Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

Comments
  • 10
    Another case for The X-Files - unsolved mysteries... 🤤
  • 0
    You're not that old 😀
    My first PC was a 16mhz 386.
    Your story reminds me a PC I fixed, back in the day, that runned windows 3.1 in weird pinkish and purple tones.
    Turns out nothing was wrong with the hardware, the mouse came with a driver or a tsr that messed the vga palette.
  • 0
    @ClemFrieckie
    The first real PC I used was 8088, but it belonged to my older brother. The 386 was mine, I payed it for more than it lasted, still it made me some money.
    A Schneider Euro XT. Complete with external hard disk and a and scanner.
    A beast at the time 😀
  • 1
    My first was:
    windows 95
    500mb ram
    5gb storage
    And some shit graphics thingy
  • 1
    @ClemFrieckie
    Not sure it was scsi, probably plain esdi (?) over a proprietary plug :(
    Still have my scsi controller cards just in case :p
  • 2
    I caught the computing bug on the Trash-80s the school library had. Found another kid with the bug and he invited me over to see his Texas Instruments system. FF a few months and I was the proud owner of a Laser 128... it was an Apple //c clone back before Apple made people stop cloning their systems. It had an amber monochrome monitor. 5.25" floppy drive. Remember hole punchers for more disk space? Built-in 300 or 1200 baud modem for dialing into BBSes and chats. My email address had four formats depending on which network you were on... Bitnet, ARPA, etc. Get off my lawn. 👵🤷😒
  • 1
    First computer was a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive, fast boot cartridge and a daisy wheel printer.
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