I come home and my laptop, which I had stashed behind a chair while it charged, has been THROWN ACROSS THE LIVING ROOM WITH SO MUCH FORCE THAT THE FLOPPY DISKS POPPED OUT!
“Oh, I was cleaning up and it wasn’t where it belonged,” sez Wife.
Grumbling to myself, I take it to a neutral room and test it for damage. OH NO! The contrast knob no longer works!
I pop it open and screw down the knob, which had probably been loose for some time. Other than that it was fine.
Saved again by my old crap. It’s a Toshiba T1100 Plus, a paleolaptop with an 8mhz 8086, 640k RAM and two 720k floppies. Made in '86 so it’s almost as old as some Dopers. No hard drive and no illuminated screen to burn battery life; I timed a charge at 13.5 hours once before I got bored waiting for the Charge Me light to come on. (The lion’s share of the time was NOT spent staring at it in case you wanted to know.) Runs Wordstar 5 fine, which can do most everything Word can do and reads into most modern word processors fine. Excellent keyboard for typing. And it survives flying across the room undamaged.
And yes, I’ve had later laptops but this one does what I need it to do. To use a Jerry Brownism, it’s appropriate technology. And being old crap that has no real commercial value I wouldn’t have been all THAT mad if it had gotten broken.
Well, for me, there’s the Baseball god, the Icee/Slurpee god, the Good Night’s Sleep god, the Bus On Time god, and the Please Let Me Meet A Cute Guy Today god.
But this thread isn’t about sex, it’s about old tech!
When I was cleaning the family room I found a 16k ram chip stuck in my shoe. Does this mean that I haven’t cleaned since 1983? Nope, just means that I upgraded a TRS80 Color Computer to 64k recently.
I have a lovely Mac Plus here … external hard drive and all ! … still trying to network it in to the rest of my machines … almost won a bid for an external SCSI network card with Mac OS support!! almost
Lazarus, my mom used to work on one, and she loved that computer. I wish I had one at home! I’ve got an iMac, and although I couldn’t go back to a Mac Plus, I still think they’re awesome machines. I associate it with my early geek days. If you can get yours to work with your newer stuff, that’s great. Good to see them still serving their purposes.
Hey, coolness! My first computer was my dad’s Toshiba T1000 laptop. I went online with Prodigy and its 2400 baud modem, even hooked up a mouse and a CGA monitor we bought for $50 or so from Radio Shack. After that, I moved to the Mac - played around on Dad’s Powerbook 140, then a Mac Plus he brought home from work, then an LC III, a Quadra 650, a Performa 6220, a G3, and now my new G4. (Everybody say “Ooooooh.”)
