[GTALUG] pigs with wings

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I'm going to do the unthinkable: throw out a working notebook tomorrow.

An NEC Versa SX from 1999.
Running Fedora Core 1.
Pentium 2 @ 233MHz
256M of RAM
10G HDD [an upgrade from something considerably smaller]
Video: Trident Cyber 9388
Screen: 1024x768.
No built-in networking (that's what PCcards are for).
Swappable bay for CD writer and floppy drive (I have both).
Came with a Windows NT 3.5 license (if I remember correctly).
but with Win98 installed.

The video is a problem: it is only "TrueColor": 16 bits/pixel. The X 
driver has a long-standing bug where at each power-on the video might be 
in a state where the colours are screwed up.  The only cure is to power 
cycle.  The fundamental problem is that X doesn't know how to fully 
initialize the device.  Kind of 50/50, if I remember correctly.

I'm playing with it now.  The screen is bright and clear.  I quite like 
the feel of the keyboard.  There is a constant fan noise.

The machine was quite nice for its day but things are mostly better 
now.  I bought this 17 years ago, lets say 8 doublings by Moore's law.
Current nice notebooks vs this:

RAM: 16G (2^6 better)
SSD/HDD: 256G vs 10G (2^5 more capacity but a lot faster)
HDD/HDD: 2T vs 3.2G (2^10 more capacity and a bit faster)
screen: 3200x1800 vs 1024x768 (2^3 better)
CPU: 2.4GHz vs 233MHz (2^3 faster clock but more instructions/second too)

So: Growth is impressive but Moore's law doesn't seem to have applied.