Thursday, January 10, 2008

Fun with old technology



Pictured above, two distant cousins - my beloved Macbook, and an ancient Compaq Presario 1210. I snagged the compaq from a buddy of mine who was chucking it out, I decided to be geeky and put linux on it for the heck of it. The compaq will run Damn Small Linux, but just barely. However, it lacks network capability, and even USB ports (at least that I can see, Linux says it detects USB on boot, maybe an unused controller built into the mainboard somewhere?) so I'm scratching my head as to how to use it. Digital picture frame maybe... but the screen is only 800x600 and a bit grainy. I wish I could think of some sort of, shall we say, artistically interesting one-time use... but I'm drawing a blank.

Anyway, it felt like time travel to switch between the compaq and the macbook, so I thought I would take a snapshot of them side-by-side. With my motorola razor picture phone. Which also seemed a little anachronistic as the compaq brought me down the memory lane of boot-floppies and text-only displays.

Then, just to be fair, I had my macbook take a picture of my phone.

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