My best hack was closing the window curtains to get a mouse to work. It quit working one weekend and I bought another one for a few bucks. Next weekend the same problem came up. I thought about cleaning it, but remembered it was brand new. The old cheap mouse had a thin casing and a ball tracker moving wheels with spokes. It worked OK at night, but during the day the sun hit the side of the mouse and lit up the motion sensors, making it unresponsive. Can you imagine phoning a help desk complaining about a mouse problem and they tell you to close the drapes.

PDP-10, my first love. Working as a part timer in operations, it was so much more friendly than the CDC machine sitting in the other half of the computer room. Later, in a small business I pushed to go from Honeywell to the pdp-1170 in about 1977 or so. The Honeywell salesman's quote was "No one would ever use a timesharing machine for business". But we were early adopters. Quite the ride. Had to develop our own database (indexed file manager) and get it working in 32k. With screen routines in programs, had to move the file manager to another process. Probably one of the 1'st file servers ever written :) That vt100 brings back memories. What a leap, to be able to change the baud rate without using a screw driver (or dime) on the underside of a VT52.