Why I use old hardware

Re:Why I use old hardware by magduf on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @12:53PM (#18980617)

My laptop at home is a Dell Latitude E6450 (I think that's the one); it's the last one where they had a real keyboard and not that stupid island shit, and it also has a trackpoint and a normal trackpad with actual buttons. After that generation, they finally jumped on the stupid mushy island key bandwagon, so I don't know how to upgrade from this machine. I had one of the newer Latitudes at my last job and it was nearly unusable because of that shitty keyboard. Honestly, WTF is wrong with everyone these days?

Luckily, this laptop can play x265 1080p video just fine and has 16GB of memory, but 4k is a no-go.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why I use old hardware by cr0sh on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @05:39PM (#18983934)

Best laptop keyboard I ever used was on a Compaq SLT/386 I owned. Keyboard could be detached from the laptop (ok, today it would be considered a "luggable", but back then, it was a nice machine), and it had a coiled cord that plugged into the computer underneath where the keyboard sat.

You could unplug it from the computer (it was a mini-din PS/2 style plug). The keyboard itself wasn't mechanical (not a buckling spring or similar system), but it did have full-travel keys and a nice feel for typing on.

I got mine used and had to build a custom battery pack from old cell phone batteries, which made me have to remove 2 meg of RAM (to fit the larger custom battery pack), leaving me with 6 meg instead of 8. I had Caldera OpenDOS installed on it:

http://www.deltasoft.com/opendos.htm

http://esca.atomki.hu/paradise/dos/opendos-en.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

...with Monkey Linux installed on top of that (Monkey is a distro that used DOS for the underlying file system - you could even share data easily):

http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/ (downloads don't work)

http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/download/monkey/monke...

I'm honestly not sure where or if you can still get a copy of that distro - I should look into it; maybe I should host my copy somewhere...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why I use old hardware by magduf on Thursday January 24, 2019 @02:46PM (#18992221)

I can't speak to laptop keyboards that far back in time, but for a very long time, Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes had the best keyboards for laptops (obviously they weren't going to compare to a Model M or other mechanical keyboard).

But even these have gone away, to be replaced by the shitty island keys.

[ Parent | on HN ]