Pieces of the Past

[davidn]

One of the things we've unearthed while packing is my ancient laptop, the one from the RGU that was handed down to me by my dad - I used it in the first year of university before I got a halfway decent computer instead. It was built in about 1997, and I can only find a record of it on a Polish laptop review site - it's a Slimnote VX, a mystifyingly overconfident name for it because it's not so much "slim" as built like a Sherman tank, and shares many properties - such as weight and processing power - with a breeze block.

On opening it up I remembered that it had a Dvorak keyboard, which made things a little awkward as by now I've completely forgotten how to use one. It still worked, though, and picking my way through, I found a couple of things that were lost to the past. As Windows 98 was never very good at the whole USB thing (or the whole OS thing, come to think of it), I was lucky that the generic flash drive driver worked to rescue them.

• Log files from the Sinner chatroom - not the hand-picked aren't-we-hilarious IRC quotation logs, but complete days that I saved for some reason or another and had been kept frozen in time in my mIRC folder ever since. If you were one of the people I knew from there and want to see these glimpses back into our online world then, I've uploaded them with an index page under the above link. All five of them are from 2003 - I'm not sure what prompted me to save these days in particular.
• My old downloaded music collection, from the progression through Napster to Audiogalaxy to Morpheus to Kazaa. There must be about 200MB of it, which was quite a lot at the time (the hard drive is under 4GB as listed in the page above). It also includes a couple of oddly combined AMVs from before they were everywhere - there was one of Silent Hill that somebody I knew made, conspicuously in a folder called "not Linkin Park" in a critical conflict between my urge for classification and for basic decency.
• Script files for Blackadder, Red Dwarf and The Young Ones. Ubiquitous as they are now, Youtube and BitTorrent were years away from existence at this point and downloading videos was pretty infeasible over the connection speeds of the time, so we had to make do with these!
• An essay with the title "Prejudice", written by a friend when he was in fourth year of school, if I'm interpreting right. I'm still not really sure how this could have got there, but I asked him if he wanted it and he said to destroy all record of its existence.

I also found various things that I'd made and abandoned, including a couple of ZZT files that never really went anywhere. Maybe I'll put those together in a zip like I did for my old Megazeux stuff a while ago.

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

I got an e-mail today at work about the shocking number of government-funded (and occasionally charity-funded) laptops that disappear from universities, and how this was a major factor in the decision to stop buying so many computers. It doesn't sound like yours was much of a loss to the education system though.

[davidn]

I should say that my dad was never an accessory to the premature disapperance of laptops :) He would receive one at a time from the university and use that as his work laptop until well past the date it was at all considered useful, after which they'd give him an upgrade and never show any interest in ever getting the old one back. I think there are two even earlier ones (486 processors, if I remember) still around somewhere in my ex-bedroom, having not been operable since the mid-90s.