As long as they're not something like Sparcbooks or the legendary Alphabook, who cares as long as they're dead. Most people just toss these things when they're dead or no longer wanted. Think of it as saving them from polluting some landfill. Besides their idea of vintage is probably Sony Viao's or Apple iBooks and Powerbooks. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

I should have said that one myself :^) Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

What would be considered a good use of older laptops? Are the machines in the Computer Museum being under-utilized? (http://www.computerhistory.org/) I'm not disagreeing with you, but there are a LOT of laptops (and other computers) out there, and there is a certain vintage that I wouldn't consider classic, or collectable, but I wouldn't consider them usable either. Most 386 and early 486 laptops come to mind. The cost of Pentium laptops are so low the 386/486 machines are basically free. Most charitable organizations won't accept machines that old. Here's an interesting article on where some restaraunts get the junk they put on their walls: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021115.html ----- Original Message ----- From: "R. D. Davis" <rdd(a)rddavis.org> To: <ClassicCmp(a)vintage-computer.com>om>; "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, June 06, 2004 7:51 PM Subject: Re: Possibly OT: FW: Vintage Laptops Wanted 01:30:02PM -0700: animals: & such

Bingo. (I would have said this myself, except I figured nobody _here_, of all places, needed to hear it....) My laptop collection consists of about four HP Omnibooks with various degrees of damage, from none to relatively bad (some of them were shipped with insufficient packing - I keep them around for parts). About the only thing it doesn't do that I might want is X, and that's because I value my sanity too much to try to understand XFree86 rather than because there's anything inherently impossible about it. The Omnibooks I mention above were obtained for free. I spent the last half of 2002 working for Universitetet i Troms? (the University of Troms?, in northern Norway). They had a pile of something like 40 of those Omnibooks that the University had decided were old enough to be considered worthless. Fortunately, the staff did not entirely agree, and thus kept them in a corner of an office rather than tipping them into the skip; their attitude was basically "here, take two, they're small". I did have to put a bigger disk in it - the disk was only about half a gig, which was too small for what I wanted - but that was all it needed. No...they just know their "market". Most people - and approximately all people who go to charitable organizations for computers - are not interested in computers for their own sake, but rather as tools to generate Word documents for granting agencies and the like, and as such, machines not capable of running the latest bloatware _are_ basically worthless to them. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 12:12:32AM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: I'm still using a Compaq 286 laptop to drive my EPROM/Device programmer. I also use an XT-class laptop with dual 720K floppies and a Xircom PE3 "pocket Ethernet adapter" and Kermit as a portable "telnet terminal" The most expensive of these was $15 with a carrying case. Batteries are an issue, but the XT laptop uses a wad of C-cell-sized NiCds - easy enough to rebuild. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 08-Jun-2004 03:00 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -77 F (-60.6 C) Windchill -114.7 F (-81.5 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 10.6 kts Grid 036 Barometer 668.8 mb (11050. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html