Rubénerd!

What started as a post describing what a really ancient Compaq computer would look like spawned an entire investigation into an embarrassing aspect of my childhood, and even promoted WordPress to publish the drafts before they were finished!

That's an old computer

I have no idea how I got there, but a few days ago I stumbled across the above so-called Ancient Compaq for sale. With a title like that, who could refuse a look?!

It turns out the machine was decidedly less ancient than what I was expecting, but it turns out I had a soft spot for the Compaq Preario towers from the 1990s. These later models were less interesting, but I remember as a kid desperately wanting one of the earlier models that looked looked like a little spaceship. I'd buy one of those and fit it with a modern board quicker than you could say NOSTALGIA, if I could remember the model number.

Tracking it down

At that stage, I was ready to post this silly entry and move on. But a part of me was interested in what model of Presario I wanted as a kid. A few minutes on Google Images turned up which series it was: the Presario 5510! Relesed in 1998, the entry level Presario 5510 had these impressive specs:

• 266MHz Celeron CPU
• 64MiB of RAM
• 4GB hard drive and a
• K56Flex fax modem

The 5030, 5110 and 5520 to 5560 models had higher specs, such as 8GB drives and 350MHz Pentium IIs.

Clearly my 12 year old self had an overly active imagination, looking at that picture now it's embarrassing to think I once thought it looked like a spaceship. I suppose the curved lines resemble fins on a rocket... slightly. Maybe. Oh Ruben, you silly kid!

Still, it stuck with me in my head all this time, and now I must locate one and purchase it, if only to satify that little kid in me. If you couldn't have stuff as a kid, you can get it when you're older, right? And I could replace the internals with a modern board and use it as a file server. This is called justifying frivolousness.

As I've found with a lot of these kinds of searches, it was Japanese sites that had the most information. For detailed technical lists ranging from old computers to mountain bikes, nobody does it better than the Japanese. Their meticulous attention to detail impresses even my German genes.

I'll be mirroring local copies of these PC Watch, InverseNet.co.jp, pc-kaitori.jp pages, just because.

When I went to bed last night, HP were still making computers and webOS devices. A lot can happen in one night!

Then rhymes with "Gwen"

See what I did there?

I don't know exactly when this started, but lately I've prefaced most of my blog posts with rambling bouts of nostalgia punctured with lame attempts at humour, then signed off with a submissive "but I digress" before launching into the meat of the matter. This post will be no different.

My first experience with HP was a year before I got my first iMac DV in the late 1990s. The 200MHz Pentium MMX machine we'd built at Funan Centre was starting to show its age (though ironically it's outlasted ever other machine I've ever built and still runs even now!) and we were on the lookout for something new. Out of the blue at COMEX in Singapore, HP were having a sale on the Brio BAx line of business desktops, and we snagged one.

Compared to the ugly, overly plastic boxes the Pavilion desktops came in, the Brio line looked rather smart with its simple lines and slight curves at the front. The machine had a blazingly fast 450MHz Pentium III (or "Pentium !!!" if you took their marketing seriously), a 8.4GB Seagate hard drive and 128MiB of PC133 memory. Because it was technically a business machine it only had onboard graphics, but it was all someone like me needed, particularly when I spent most of my time in an editor hacking away at my latest favourite programming language and only briefly stopping for some SimCity 3000.

Cooler still was what came with it. It happened to be the first computer I owned that came with a CD burner, and a gigantically massive 17" display instead of the crusty 14.5 I'd been using as a loaner from our original 486 machine from 1991! It was also a fateful machine in that it was the first one I tried Red Hat Linux on back in the day, but that's for another post :).

The only other piece of HP hardware I had from that time was a so-called "handheld PC" Given I was still a kid, my dad didn't trust that I wouldn't drop a laptop, so he bought me this little HP 620LX Windows CE 2.0 device for my birthday one year. For family trips overseas where we'd be away from my beloved desktop, this little machine let me keep programming and tinkering :). As of today, aside from a vertical cyan coloured stripe across one side of the screen, it still works!

Today rhymes with "away"

So now we finally come back to the present. Hewlett Packard, one of the original icons of technoligical innovation and progress, has had a troubled recent history. Carly Fiorina's acquisition of Compaq gave them the server hardware and expertise they wanted, but also a legacy of race to to the bottom hardware.

In trying to be Dell, they only hastened the demise of their personal computer unit. Their "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign was embarrassing, couldn't shake off their reputation for being a business company, and fell on deaf ears as creative professionals and those really looking for Something Different fled to Apple.

On the mobile side, their acquisition of the troubled Palm didn't reverse their fortunes either. webOS, in my opinion the finest mobile operating system on the market today, was doomed from the start by slow hardware, face-palmingly poor marketing and a strategic position that none of us understood. It wasn't much cheaper than the also vertically integrated iPhone, didn't offer the breadth of devices of Android, and was only sold in a few select markets.

While for my own personal reasons I'm disappointed in the latter, from a business perspective it makes sense for HP to do this. Junky desktops and laptops simply aren't profitable anymore, and their webOS devices always seemed like an odd fit for an enterprise company who's only other consumer focused devices were high end calculators.

I'll be interested to see where they go from here. I suggest they do some Invent-ing.

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to mirror their site with httrack. I'm a sucker for nostalgia, not that you'd know.

If you remember back a few weeks ago I posted that I had inherited a Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook. It's no MacBook Air in the design department, but without optical and floppy disk drives, it's very lightweight and small. It's also several years old and has very conservative specs (600MHz Mobile PIII from 2002!) though, so it certainly won't be running Windows Vista any time soon... which is just fine because my favourite OS (for non-Apple hardware of course!) is FreeBSD.

Before I go any further I have to say this right up front: FreeBSD in the mobile space has come a long way. Despite my preference for the BSDs I always told people up until recently that they were better off running a flavour of Linux such as Slackware or Gentoo (my two preferred distributions) if they wanted to run a free OS that was a bit more technical and capable on their laptops.

Not any more! I popped in a home burned CD of the latest release of FreeBSD (7.0-RELEASE) and booted the installer and was absolutely blown away by the hardware support. Not only did it detect the internal 10/100 ethernet port and the ATI graphics but the PCMCIA wireless card which has always been iffy in past experiences. After installing, booting for the first time, updating the base system, installing Gnome2-lite from ports and configuring Xorg I had a slick and completely usable desktop (rearranged to resemble Leopard of course!):

What also really blows me away is how responsive all the applications are, especially on a fully fledged DE like Gnome (which itself only takes a few seconds to start) and on such conservative hardware: granted I almost tripled the amount of built in memory from 128MiB to 320MiB and installed a new hard drive with a much larger cache than the previous stock!

I can really see myself using this instead of my MacBook Pro in settings such as coffee shops or for lectures where I'm only running a local wiki for note taking, editing source code and using email; the marketing for the Asus EeePC and the MacBook Air is starting to sink in it seems! I could have used Xfce, Fluxbox or the like, but I'm so impressed with Gnome's performance as is, currently I don't see the need.

I'm still in the early stages of setting this machine up with its new OS and DE, but I'll post more information as I find out. On my current to do list: figure out if and how the "soft buttons" above the regular keyboard can be used somehow, getting high resolution console support compiled into the kernel and figuring out how to adjust the screen brightness on the fly. I haven't tested the built-in modem yet as I haven't needed it, but potentially getting that set up to send faxes would be useful too.

Though my father's company I've been able to get a hold of a very svelte, thin, lightweight Compaq Armada M300 laptop, complete with docking station that provides the optical and disk drives!

The specifications are fairly conservative (as in old but still nice, not the icky political kind) so it won't be running Windows Vista any time soon, but for a mostly FreeBSD guy like me who's been wanting to try out his favourite OS in a mobile environment it's just what I've been looking for:

Weight and Dimensions

1.5kg, less than 2.3cm thin when closed

Processor

Mobile Pentium III 600MHz with SpeedStep (whatever that means!)

Display

12.1" TFT XGA display

Memory

128MiB PC133 SDRAM, upgradable to 320MiB

Audio

ES1978 Maestro 2E

Hard drive

40GB 5400RPM IDE Seagate

Networking

Belkin Wireless G PCMCIA card
Lucent LT WinModem (bummer!)
Ethernet Intel Ethernet Pro 100 (82557)

The only major downside is that the battery it came with is completely shot, it barely holds a charge. Fortunately now that I found a kickarse battery shop in Sim Lim Square, having the cells in it replaced shouldn't be too expensive. I'll probably want to get a tad more memory for it as well: a check on the current Singapore hardware pricelists shows that'll cost less than SG$40.

With all this talk about ASUS EeePC's and MacBook Air laptops that don't have integrated optical drives and are therefore much smaller and more portable, this Armada M300 subnotebook without the docking station (and therefore without optical and disk drives) is also stunningly slim and much lighter than my MacBook Pro! Obviously it's more underpowered than the Air, but for a machine I can slip into my bag and just use in coffee shops for email, light web browsing and updating Twitter and this weblog, it looks just right.

I can see though I'll be very tempted to upgrade a lot of things with this machine, but I'll try to resist! Perhaps a brand new 7200RPM 200GB hard disk to increase performace... oh and a glossy screen protector... and a nice new Crumpler bag to put it in... and some FreeBSD stickers for the lid... and a keyboard protector... oh and a nice little black aluminium cooling pad...

And something else? In the bag it came in, there's a licenced, retail copy of Windows 2000 Professional. I know OEM versions are tied to the machine you bought it with (how do you spell corruption?) but this retail version will let me install it on another machine. With copies of 2000 harder and harder to find thesedays now that Blista and XP are out, this is reassuring, even if I don't end up using it.