A guy at work often talks about his first handful of computing devices. His history precedes mine by at least several years, but I at least recognise much of what he talks about.
A younger guy at work then laughs at us and in particular likes to poke fun at my "computer museum." He rightfully guessed that I have a number of older computing devices at home that, while aren't worth anything at all, are worth volumes to me for their personal value. I also revel in the fact that I have a punch card from some long-forgotten something, even though I never actually got to use punch cards nor seen a machine that uses them. (The older guy at work has. I'm not that jealous, though. Those things were a pain in the petoobies.)
How did I broach this subject, anyway? Well, this morning I was eating breakfast and thinking about how I seldom ever write anymore. That reminded me that there are several letters I've written in the last year that were on my 1955 Underwood typewriter, or in ink scrawled onto today's version of parchment paper by a metal-nibbed dipping pen. Then I remembered that much of my writing has been done on an IBM ThinkPad 755CD. Why? Well, first, it was my first laptop back in November of 2000. I bought it (then) for $289 (or was it 389?). It was obviously used, and it was about five years old. It had Windows 98 first edition on it, but it was made for 95 and it wouldn't take 98se. I remember that because I tried to put 98se on it after wiping out 98 and not having the disc... the guy never gave me that. Amazing little laptop, though, for its time. You could swap out the floppy drive with the CDROM drive. It would only connect to the internet via a modem, however, which soon died on me - it was one of those single-slot pcmcia cards. For whatever reason, the onboard modem never worked for me. I eventually replaced the card with a different card so I could hook it up to my later network. No idea what happened to that card.
The other reason I used this laptop for writing - even after I had other computers kicking around - is simple. The keyboard. I have always loved the feel of that keyboard. There is something rewarding about the way the keys almost "click" beneath my fingertips. They feel heavy, not membranous, which is awesome for a laptop keyboard since those ARE membranous. It wasn't quite mechanical, but darned close in many regards. I remember at the time not being sure I liked it because it wasn't like the mechanical keyboards or the deeper ones I'd gotten used to. But it caught on quickly and I found I was very efficient on that thing.
I get all misty-eyed when I think about the relics in that "computer museum" of mine. Do they all get used? Not often. I turn them on now and then just to keep their batteries alive and to wake up their antiquated, cold mainboards and make sure they still work.
The ThinkPad, though, I do occasionally sit down and fingerblab at. The funny thing is that the only way for me to currently get stuff off it is to use a floppy disk for storage, and then shove the disk into a USB floppy drive (also IBM branded) and plug that into my main computer. My main computer has an SSD and a hybrid drive, boots in under 17 seconds, and can run seven virtual machines on top of its own native OS - all at once. It has 8 GB of RAM and runs on an i7 quadcore processor at 2GHz. By current standards, probably about middle of the road to almost defunct, I'm sure, but it kicks a** even by today's standards unless you're a gamer or snobby enthusiast. The casual user needs far less. The ThinkPad, by contrast, was a single-core Intel 486 DX4 running at 100MHz and I think it has 16MB of onboard RAM plus a 4MB card plugged into an expansion slot that gives it a total of 20MB. I remember it was an oddball number even at the time. The battery was still Nickel Metal Hybrid and lasted about an hour even when it was new. It quickly wasn't. I've replaced the internal battery once in the last fourteen years, which cost me about a fourth of what I paid for the laptop. But it still lives. Oh, and the screen resolution is perfect for typing on a white-on-black DOS screen: 640x480. Kids, don't try that at home. Compare that to the high definition screens of today. What do they call them again? 1080p and higher? Who needs that, anyway?
Yes, I would gladly pull out my ThinkPad, and its old eccentricities, any day for a writing session. And then slowly transfer all my blabbings to my main for longterm storage. After all, floppies are known for their tendency to fail...
~nv
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