[SunRescue] Old holdouts from the pits of hades.....

[BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> > To which the fellow on the other end of the phone replied, "I paid $350
> > for this modem back in 1984, and I'm going to get my money's worth!"

.....

> "I don't need any of that Internet "tee see" (one can only imagine he
> meant TCP/IP) stuff.  Lynx works fine for me, and Windows 95 sucks.  Why
> should I upgrade?"
> 
> You kinda have to agree with the guy in some respects.  95 does suck. 
> However, 3.1 was no beauty itself.  Yet, even I, a collector of old and
> silly things, have a PII 333 for my internet surfing. :)
> 
> I guess he wanted to get his money's worth out of this broken-down ol'
> 3.1 machine.

I havta side a little bit with the old codger.

Case in point:

For years I have run a low-end dos box (386/20/8mram/ethernet/200mbhd)
as a portable ftp ferry box and emergency terminal.  Running kermit
or telnet or ftp off the serial or ethernet port in vt100 mode turned
out to be a lifesaver, many times.  The large real sized keyboard
(as opposed to the miniscule klutzy error-prone modern laptop keyboard)
on the luggable IBM P70 crate, was easy to use, and the red plasma
screen a joy to read.  Although I would not try to use such a critter
as a webscraper, as an ftp/cmdlineterminal box it was ideal.

Alas, it went bellyup a few days ago, and parts are unobtainium.

Oh, well, now it is time to scare up one of those Zenith or Toshiba
early laptops with the biggie keyboards and some sort of ethernet
to replace it.

The funny thing is the old critter worked way better than my sparcbook
for ease of use.  The sparcbook is a nicer unix laptop, but its keyboard
is the worst thing ever put on anything, except for the PC Jr. chicklet
keyboard.

Oh, well, mebbie it is time to ``modernize'' the ftp ferry crate......

Bob