You know, I was thinking the Thinkpad was going to go to crap after Lenovo bought it, but overall I didn't have anything negative to say. I wore mine out, keeping it way beyond it's end of life and it kept chugging. It was difficult to part, in fact, but so goes change.
We switched from Dell to Lenovo at work and the amount of times I’ve had to totally reformat a computer for something just randomly not working right and not being able to find another fix for it has gone to almost zero. Before, with 20 computers, every couple months we had to reformat at least one laptop.
Not a single person has complained about missing Dell in two years.
Hah, I remember the Gateway box being so large I could get in it at the time. And being cow themed seemed quite odd, but that thing was a beast at the time. I do miss the old Amiga though too.
Thanks for the little nostalgia trip! Well done on keeping some mementos. Hope the Gateway finds a good home to go to!
Hmm, I can't remember now if I've linked the guy doing his own semiconductor etching in his garage. I definitely have elsewhere, and that's kind of similar.
He built his first etching setup when in high school,,, after graduating college a few years ago, he ended up starting a company with Jim Keller, the coauthor of x86-64
The thing is, while rolling back experienced computer performance/degrowthing computing clearly has to happen
I think hand-wired 8 bit computing is an educational rather than practical thing. (Obviously 8 bit AVR MCUs are a practical thing). 32 bit physical lisp machines on fpgas! (Eventually)
@curtosis
Unlike me, you should talk to @amszmidt. What do you think about the existing port/emulation of the 1985 LM-3 #MITCADR to #HDL as a starting point for a modern lisp computer (instead of the scheme things that happen sometimes)? (I've tried and failed to get involved because of excuses. ;_;).
I forgot the LM discussion of Actually Using The Extra Bits Available. @me@retrocomputing
@screwtape@amszmidt@me@retrocomputing I do vaguely recall it was an interesting question, though not the details. I will admit at least partial interest in the Because I Can factor of historical recreation. ;-)
Silicon foundries use a lot of water and raw materials and contaminate the ground. Full degrowth may involve abandoning semiconductor technologies and making computers out of simpler parts, such as electromagnetic relays. They’ll be a lot slower and simpler, but with the right knowledge, one can make them from raw materials without bootstrapping a complex technology chain.
abandoning semiconductor technologies and making computers out of simpler parts
I remember reading an article a while back about basically computing using cards which block or allow light to flow as a series of logic gates. Another way to think of it is reinventing the punch card.
I learned TI BASIC on a Texas Instruments 99/4a back in the very early 80s. Wrote some programs from magazines, saved them on tapes, and went on to automate D&D character creation in an attempt to rules-lawyer an all-PC dwarf army.
Fun fact, though: TI BASIC lived on until at least the late 90s, on the TI graphing calculators that everyone taking Algebra/Trig had to buy -- or borrow from the school. I wrote a surreal choose-your-own-adventure game on my calculator, large enough that because of memory limitations, you couldn't open the file to edit it without deleting another, ancillary file.
And since you could transfer programs via a proprietary cable, I put that game on every school calculator and as many of my friends' as wanted it. It was still there years later when I visited.
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