CAN'T WASTE A WARM LAPTOP

Having given up on hopes of getting a modern OpenSSH set up on my old
Pentium 1, and having seen that compiling GNU inetutils for OpenWRT
wouldn't be easy (because compiling anything for it appears to be a
major project), I just set up a script on the router that rsyncs
files FTPed onto it (there is at least an FTP server available) when
signaled by the presence of the file "UPDATE" in the FTP root.

So as long as I could now upload from anything, and inspired a bit
by Logout's recent post about his "holy grail" motherboard, which
mainly served to make me do some Ebay searches and realise that my
piles of 90s computer bits are actually worth something now, I dug
out my old 33MHz i486 Toshiba laptop.

This was actually my school laptop, but if you've been following
cosely you'll know that I'm not nearly old enough for early 90s
laptops to be in general circulation during my school years,
particularly my latter ones as was the case. In fact I was wacky
enough to be doing my secondary school classwork on a laptop that
was older than myself, simply for the fun of it. I don't think
anyone there was nerdy enough to genuinely think this was impressive
rather than just weird, but some did at least enjoy the novelty value.

I bought a Canon BJC-50 portable ink-jet printer (actually I think
three or four of them because it was a bulk lot on Ebay that went
for nothing because nobody sane wanted portable printers with a
parallel port interface) to use with it. Those things are really
quite impressive actually - about half the size of the laptop and
battery powered with full colour (though I think I just used a black
cart.). There was even a scanner cartridge that turned it into a
portable scanner as well, I think.

So in the early 2010s I was able to type up docs in Window 95's
WordPad (in combination with the excellent "spell check for edit
boxes" freeware program which ran really well, in contrast to a DOS
port of Aspell which tool over an hour to check a document), and print
out right at the same desk, with everything packing away into a laptop
bag smaller than a modern one (because laptops, although thicker, were
much less wide back then). I managed to buy a box of cartridges for the
printer at the local computer store just before they got rid of their
old cartridge stock, and as it happened they had an old PCMCIA to
Compact Flash card adapter floating around out the back which they
gave me. By remarkable happenstance all of the desktop computers at
school were fitted with card readers in their once-floppy-drive-bays,
including a Compact Flash car reader. Compact Flash cards, for those
who don't know, actually use the same communication protocol as old
IDE HDDs, so the driver support is very good even with old OSs. Just
by saving all docs as RTFs I could bridge the 20 year technology gap
like it didn't exist.

A 2GB CF card was also a pretty nice addition to the meer 131MB storage
space of the laptop's own hard disk, so I could install all sorts of
old Win95 and DOS software to play with without running short on space.

But I didn't stop there. I found Basic Linux as a way to escape the
M$ monopoly in my little capsule of last-century computing. This extremely
stripped-down Slackware 4 based distro installs of floppy disks, can be
booted from DOS, and runs with room to spare within this lappie's 8MB of
RAM (though things get a bit painful if you try to run X). Besides
unlocking access to linux games Tom Bombem (8KB shooter written in
Assembly! http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/tb1/tb_asm.html )
and castlemaze, which I just rediscovered (got to level 2 in bombem,
the black knight skewered me at the first bridge in castlemaze), this
also offered a path to the internet.

With an old PCMCIA WiFi card and lots of research of wireless chipsets
and investigation of how Linux modules work (this is how I really
learnt the basics of Linux - _much_ easer by looking at a really
stripped-down distro like Basic Linux), I was able to get online
and browse the (then much less encrypted) web. I've discovered now
that there doesn't seem to be a Gopher client easily available. Lynx
is, but there seem to be a few things to set up to get it working
so I might try that some other time - if there's enough HDD space
left. Shame there's not a Slackware 4  package for the original
Gopher client.

Actually I spent a lot of time trying to install an FTP client before
I gave up and then discovered that you can use the ftpput command
that's part of BusyBox. On top of that, I had to deal with the old
problem with this laptop that I refered to in the heading - it only
works when warm. I've got a few early Toshiba laptops, and they seem
to suffer from strange power supply problems. This one won't start
up unless it's warm. It's probably due to the caps, but short of a
service manual I failed to work out how to remove the PSU module
when I pulled it apart before (might have better luck if I tried
again now though). So the solution, especially in cold weather like
now, is a prolonged, very close hug. In this case, half an hour of
under-the-jumper cuddling was just enough to get it to keep powered
up into the BIOS self test (complaining that the previously replaced
BIOS battery's dead - probably a good thing because I used to have
the start-up password set in it and have long forgotten what it was)
and beyond.

So late as it was after figuring out the commands to enable PCMCIA
and connect to my home WiFi, reliving my teenage computing memories,
and browsing though the facinating ELinks-friendly website of the
bloke who wrote that Tom Bombem game, I just had to stay up and
write this post explaining my history with this beige Japanese
machine, because I couldn't waste a warm laptop.

 - The Free Thinker.

PS. Colour STN LCD displays rock! Soak up that motion blur man!
    Work that contrast adjustment knob!