Anyways, last Friday I went to a garage sale. well technically it was a yard sale, as it wasn't in a garage. but then again they weren't selling their yard, so it really wasn't a yard sale either. it was basically just a here's-some-old-junk-get-it-out-of-our-sight sale.
Right, right, right. *ahem* so, I'm at this garage/yard/here's-some-old-junk-get-it-out-of-our-sight sale, and I'm browsing this table of stuff. the lady who's running the sale tells me that she has an old laptop for sale and it's only five bucks. I snatched it up in a heartbeat.
Well maybe a little longer than a heartbeat. I'm not sure how long a heartbeat is.
...and now I'm googling it...
What the heck is "hearthstone?"
Now I have to google that...
*sigh* another one of those so-called "free to play" games...well at least now I know what it is and am that much more enlightened for it.
Anyway, turns out a heartbeat lasts about .75 seconds on average. Don't quote me on that though. It took me about that long to decide I wanted the thing, but to actually snatch it up - er - pick it up in a very dignified manner - took a little longer than that. Anyways I got it home and started messing around with it.
The thing isn't even that big - it's barely 12 inches diagonally
Checking the model number, I quickly googled the model (Compaq Aero 4/33c) and pulled up this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Aero
Turns out the laptop I got was made in 1994-ish and runs an operating system called MS DOS 6.2. For those of you who, like me, were born after 1994, DOS is a Microsoft operating system that uses a command line instead of a mouse and keyboard - so instead of clicking on things, you type your requests into the computer. that actually goes a bit faster for some things, but you have to know all the magic spells - er - commands.
Expelliarmus!
The keyboard's nice and normal, but the built-in mouse is downright weird. It uses a trackball rather than a trackpad like nowadays, and the buttons are on the side - took me awhile to figure that one out, but it's sort of ergonomic, I guess.
It's not your imagination - when closed, the thing's over an inch and a half thick.
After learning a couple of commands, I finally figured out how to turn on Windows - by typing "win" into the command line.
win for the win!
This ends up launching a very primitive version of Windows - number 3.11. Even if our current Windows 10 is really Windows 9, this makes for a trip back in memory lane. Or, if you're like me and born after 3.11 was a thing, a trip into ancient history.
Historical re-enactment time...
So finally when I got to the desktop, both my windows and mac sides started freaking out. there was. no. taskbar. of any sort. Instead, everything was organized in a strange software known as tab works.
They even take the pains to make it look like a real notebook.
Within tab works you can easily access pretty much everything on the tiny machine. Since there's no means of connecting to the internet or transferring files on or off of the machine (since the removable disk drive was removed when I bought the thing and it only took floppies anyway), there aren't that many things that can be done on the machine as is. However, I've used it as a notepad for to-do lists and the like while working on my mac. And of course there's solitaire.
I actually beat this once. Can you believe it?
I'm not sure what all I'll end up doing with my purchase...it's just hitting the 20+ years mark when computers go from being complete junk to actually being sort of collectable, so I may or may not sell it on eBay (if any of you happen to want it, I'd be glad to sell it). It's also handy as a digital notebook of sorts, and, miraculously the old battery held charge for nearly an hour today (after charging for about 12), so I may take it traveling sometime.
Anyways, that's all for now from the world of Caleb, but I'll try to get back on here more often.
