a blast from the past

Student GW sent me a link a few weeks ago about how to build one's own Linux distro. I took my time before reading it because the site Lifehacker.com is such a honey trap for me: I can waste hours reading about how to become more efficient. What I did on that occasion was look at all the Linux articles for the past 30 days. That took about two hours.

And I ran into a picture of my second computer. Wow! I used that one and pieces of it for years and years. Here it is:

When it was closed, the keyboard (which could be detached, too) formed the bottom of its suitcase-like enclosure. It weighed 25 pounds, at least, and more in airports. You can see here that one of the floppy drives has been replaced with a hard drive — 30 MB was the size of my first one, and it was a finger-smashing proposition to get it into this machine, for everything was so tightly arranged. The monchrome screen was amber rather than green: cool!

This was my second bona-fide computer, and it cost $2500, such a deal, I thought, with two floppies and 256K RAM. I added a serial port for an extra $100. I loved it.