Older ThinkPad Kaput

Don't worry. My regular, everyday IBM ThinkPad— the one with Linux on it, the one I use to do everything but fry eggs— is fine. What went belly-up this morning was my older ThinkPad, an old thick sturdy obsolescent thing which has long since been demoted to a glorified typewriter. Well, that, plus it has on it some audio and video editing software the likes of which is not yet available for Linux.

Anyhow, the screen on the older ThinkPad this morning is nothing but a striated whitish-grey. Except for the screen, it still seems to work. But that's a mighty big "except." Oh well. I have backups of most of the data on zip disks, and I can still work from the DOS command line with my eyes closed, so it should be no problem to salvage the few newer documents.

I got that older ThinkPad six years ago, just before I moved over here to Iowa. Ah, to think of those bygone days of Windows 98 and Netscape 4.5! HotBot, Webcrawler, GoTo, Excite Search. Personal homepages on Xoom, NetTaxi, AcmeCity, NBCi. Sites with logos of animated flaming letters. Sites designed with nary a thought for style, unreadable sites with oversized lavender letters on a lime-green background. Blink tags. Gopherspace. MultiProxy. DejaNews. The Internet is a far different world today: I think time on the Internet proceeds by dog years.