Possibly OT: FW: Vintage Laptops Wanted

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Mon Jun 7 18:31:25 2004

>> What would be considered a good use of older laptops?
> [T]hey did useful work once, and they can still do that same useful
> work.

Bingo. (I would have said this myself, except I figured nobody _here_,
of all places, needed to hear it....)

> My most powerful laptop is the HP Portable+ (8MHz 8086 with 800+K
> RAM), and I do useful work on that machine. I am sure a 386 or 486
> machine could be useful too.

My laptop collection consists of about four HP Omnibooks with various
degrees of damage, from none to relatively bad (some of them were
shipped with insufficient packing - I keep them around for parts).
About the only thing it doesn't do that I might want is X, and that's
because I value my sanity too much to try to understand XFree86 rather
than because there's anything inherently impossible about it.

>> Most 386 and early 486 laptops come to mind. The cost of Pentium
>> laptops are so low the 386/486 machines are basically free.
> Well, that's not the case round here. I've never seen a cheap
> laptop, no matter how old...

The Omnibooks I mention above were obtained for free. I spent the last
half of 2002 working for Universitetet i Troms? (the University of
Troms?, in northern Norway). They had a pile of something like 40 of
those Omnibooks that the University had decided were old enough to be
considered worthless. Fortunately, the staff did not entirely agree,
and thus kept them in a corner of an office rather than tipping them
into the skip; their attitude was basically "here, take two, they're
small". I did have to put a bigger disk in it - the disk was only
about half a gig, which was too small for what I wanted - but that was
all it needed.

>> Most charitable organizations won't accept machines that old.
> Then they are mildly clueless!

No...they just know their "market". Most people - and approximately
all people who go to charitable organizations for computers - are not
interested in computers for their own sake, but rather as tools to
generate Word documents for granting agencies and the like, and as
such, machines not capable of running the latest bloatware _are_
basically worthless to them.

/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X Against HTML mouse_at_rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
Received on Mon Jun 07 2004 - 18:31:25 BST