A "blast from the past"

[bunnspecial]

I went to surplus today to hunt for mousepads.

The counters in my offices are too "shiny" for an optical mouse to register correct, and I decided I needed an honest-to-goodness mousepad rather than the random collection of papers, notebooks, etc that I've been using.

What I came up with were a couple of "Workstation 2000" branded mousepads. They were a big research computing supplier in the 90s. I have one at home that I use to flash video cards, but it has all the usual goodies that you'd expect from a computer of that era-dual "slotted" Pentium III Xeons, 512mb of ECC PC-100 RAM, and dual 68 pin SCSI hard drives. I also broke down a couple of honest-to-goodness workstation class computers that each had 4 Pentium IIs and 6 hot-swappable 80 pin SCSI drives.

In any case, the mousepads that I picked are marked "Tested with NeXTSTEP" on the top right corner. The computers I dealt with were all running Red Hat Linux, but I guess that NeXTSTEP was an option back in the day.

I grabbed all I swa. Mousepads aren't exactly a hot commodity, and the NeXTSTEP marking made them worth throwing in a drawer.

 

[MacTech68]

Nice find. Now you should load-up NextStep onto one.

BTW, I can highly recommend the "3M Precise Mousing Surface". Thin, with a rubbery backing that makes it stay-put. Washable in mild soap and a good rinse makes the rubbery surface underneath like new if/when it gets dusty. It's a unique shape but appears that it is now a discontinued line:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/301548955863

NOTE, the above link is NOT an endorsement of the seller.

There seems to be a newer version which is rectangular and is semi-adhesive, though I've not used it.

 

[bunnspecial]

I've actually been browsing Ebay for a copy of Nextstep.

I've been planning on sticking in a couple of IDE drives(it has a completely unused IDE bus at this point) and installing Win2K for old games, but putting Nextstep on it just for the sake of doing it sounds like fun also.