Just fiddling about

Yep, it's just another weekend here at the Unnecessarium.  Nothing going on beyond a lazy evening, watching YouTube videos.  (This evening's fare provided by the Aussie50 and LMull3.)

The battery on the "James Bond" laptop (ie, the Sony Vaio) finally gave out after the endless video runs, so I switched over to the T30.  (Which I jokingly [and for the oddest of reasons] also associate with a real spy, though definitely not one in a heroic vein.  We'll just leave it at that...)  I think I was kinda driven towards using a Thinkpad for the rest of the evening by LMull3's video on an IBM PS/Note 425 laptop.  Fun stuff...

I dropped the T23 off at the Computer-Shop-Across-the-River this morning.  Don't know when I'll be able to see it again.  Kind of sad about that.  I hope the fan is easily fixed, or quickly replaced.  (I suspect the latter.)  It's such a cool little computer, I wish I had it to play with.  (Might want the CMOS battery here for that, too.)

I'm going to go off on my usual little side rant about these older computers  I am perennially impressed by how capable these older systems are, once they're cleaned up and blessed with a newer, better operating system.  (Yeah, I did just take a jab at the Great Redmond Beast there...)

UXWBill has a good rant on old computers in the description of one of his videos.  I think he hits the nail on the head with his comment to the "young whippersnappers" that not everyone is interested in the latest game du jour.  Not eveyone needs a bleeding edge processor, nor the latest graphics gismos...  I certainly don't.

This old T30 cost me pennies compared to a newer system.  No, it won't play the latest games.  No it won't run Windows 8, thank God.  (There's another dig, by the way...)  It struggles just a bit to get up to speed with YouTube videos.  But, it's happily running a very up-to-date Linux operating system.  It will surf the web via a wireless card, and it can run some quite productivity powerful software.

And it's just damned cool.

I dare anyone to pull a current production laptop in that has a keyboard as nice as this one.  And I think you'd be somewhat hard-pressed to find a modern system that's as well-built as this computer is.  (And I'm including it's current day descendents in that.)

And it's just damned cool.

A couple years ago, I got a wild idea to play with a Powerbook 3400, which I'd upgraded the RAM (to a whole 80 MB), and installed OS 9.1 on.  I dragged it into the office, hooked it up, and started writing up speadsheets and reports on.  (Using MS-Office 2001 for Mac.  And no, that's not a dig...)  Using a thumb drive, I copied all of our then-current office forms over to the Powerbook.  (I  did this via a USB card, having installed the drivers from one of the Operator HeadGap CDs.)  And, you know what?  It worked perfectly.  I did a bunch of file write-ups, saved them all back to the thumb drive, and was able to email them in later from my Powerbook G4.  (If I'd put some real time in, I could've installed a wireless card on the 3400.)  No one who received those files had a clue they'd been completely written on a c.15 year old machine.

I used to routinely work in OS 9 under Classic on my old AlBook, a computer which routinely ran circles around a brand new Toshiba I had with the (then) latest version of Windows 7 installed on it.

And, no, I have no idea what brought this little rant on.  I guess I was feeling a bit defensive about my dear little T30 here.  And all the other old computers, both (former) Wintel and Mac, that festoon my room.

They're all just damned cool...