[fcbrooklyn]

I used those three button optical SPARC mice, and the bigger issue than the fact that you needed a special mousepad, was that the pad had to stay properly oriented. If the pad was rotated slightly, your mouse would go in strange directions.

[grkvlt]

Also, in our CS lab anyway, theft of the shiny mouse pads had evidently been an issue in the past, and they were often glued or otherwise attached permanently to the desks.

But why? And who? No student back then (early 90s) could even dream of affording a SparcStation, which were the only workstations which used the mouse that needed the shiny mats.

We had various types of Sun machines in the labs, from the IPX and 5, up to dual processor 20s, and they needed an (expensive, maybe 200Mb) SCSI disk to boot from. Video was to a chunky high resolution (i recall OpenLook on 1152x900 grayscale was awesome, or the expensive option, 1280x1024 colour) monitor with RGB plus sync input using that weird 13W3 socket with the wee coax connectors inside. For networking you had to embrace the world of AUI media converters and so forth, which was just annoying. Anyway, all that stuff would have cost essentially the same as a nice Mercedes or a suburban house...

Maybe people used the muse mats as bird scarers? Perhaps they dropped too much LSD and just stared at the shiny pattern? Stealth teams of research assistants might be sent to fetch replacements for their professor's workstation, after running out of funding, but needing a new one having used his as a coffee mat and broken it? Or I suppose they could have been stolen by accident, not knowing what they were, by someone who was blinded by staring at the little laser under the mouse...

[jacobush]

Thanks! Just got flashbacks to surfing the world wide web on a Sparc Station.