CERN's Compassionate Care for Retired Computer Mice
Description
A whimsical, webpage-style image advertising the 'CERN Animal Shelter for Computer Mice,' complete with the official CERN logo. The text announces the shelter's reopening after a 'disaster early 2012' and provides its location and hours. Below this, a six-panel photo series illustrates the lives of the inhabitants: old, beige, and black wired computer mice (the kind with scroll wheels and balls). The panels are captioned 'In the hay...', 'Eating...', 'Drinking...', 'Cuddling...', 'Playing...', and finally, 'Panicking...'. The first five panels show the mice in various charming, animal-like scenarios within a hay-filled environment. The final 'Panicking...' panel hilariously breaks the calm by showing a large orange tabby cat sniffing the pile of terrified computer mice. The humor is multi-layered: it's a direct pun on 'computer mice,' a nostalgic nod to obsolete hardware that senior tech professionals grew up with, and an ironic parody of a high-tech institution like CERN engaging in such a folksy, low-tech endeavor. It's a classic piece of nerdy, insider tech humor
Comments
7Comment deleted
Of course CERN runs this. They have to do something with all the hardware that becomes obsolete every time they upgrade the LHC's data pipeline. The cat is just their automated legacy hardware disposal system
Those PS/2 rodents get straw beds and visiting hours - meanwhile our decade-old prod microservice still sleeps on a RAID array floor
CERN finally found a use case for all those PS/2 mice after discovering the Higgs boson - turns out particle physics was easier than getting legacy hardware adopted
After years of dealing with memory leaks, race conditions, and pointer arithmetic, CERN finally addressed the real issue: what happens to computer mice when they reach end-of-life. Turns out the solution wasn't garbage collection or reference counting - it was literally hay, water bowls, and protection from predators. Though one wonders if they've considered the ethical implications of keeping PS/2 and USB mice in the same enclosure, or whether the adoption process requires proof of compatible drivers
Remember pets vs cattle? CERN went full pets - every PS/2 mouse gets LTS and visiting hours, because somewhere a KVM still only boots with that exact HID driver
CERN's HA solution for mice: high-availability haystacks with zero-downtime cuddling after collider-induced pointer drift
Finally, a place where legacy peripherals are treated like pets, not cattle - until the ops cat shows up and you remember PS/2 doesn’t support graceful failover