Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I'm excited to finish a PC repair that I started 16 1/2 years ago. I thought it would never happen.

@tahajin moderate on main in 2018

Have you ever been up all night tearing your house apart, looking for just one little thing that you know for certain you've hung on to for literally half your life? I can now say I have, unsuccessfully at that, & my body's going to pay for it tomorrow. (Oh crap, it *is* tomorrow!)

@anthracite One thing I learned is that "next best" in advertising winds up meaning "worst" every single time.

@colon_three My brain has the same stop code. Seriously, the omen that portents is usually one of a very busy day ahead. :/

Also, I learned the hard way that even though the 5150, XT, AT, & pre-PS/2 IBM clones all have physically compatible keyboard sockets (5-pin DIN, just like MIDI sockets), the 5150 & XT use an incompatible protocol, so AT-style keyboards won't work unless they have an XT-mode switch.

If you thought IDE hard drives were becoming scarce, just try what I spent the last few hours doing and shop for an ESDI hard drive.

I'm trying to restore a trash-picked (& VG condition) IBM 5160 (the PC XT) that turns out to have been complete except for HDD & keyboard. The rescue included an amber MDA monitor & ESDI controller with cables, though I didn't recognize the controller until today.

Going with an IDE controller & CF or SD adapter is an option, I suppose.

I came across & re-read a computer magazine from January 1998. An average laptop cost $3,000-$5,000, an average decent desktop cost $2,000-$3,500, and a barebones desktop without even a hard drive might've been had for $1,000 if you shopped around a lot. I remember eventually buying a Compaq Presario 1690 later that year (or early '99) for $4,000. It's amazing how much prices have changed in the 20 years since, even without adjusting for inflation.
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I'm saving LB for the next time a customer asks me why the Internet crashed.

@Nerts Why wait to get back into the gravity well? With large mass comes large inertia, even for macrocompanions in microgravity.

@ziphi I don't remember why exactly, but I stuck with my last name. It isn't too common, it isn't too rare, and it doesn't have any negative baggage.

One of the most amazingly useless things I recently learned is how to do subtraction, multiplication, and division on actual late-19th/early-20th Century adding machines. True adding machines, mind you, the kind that don't have any subtraction or other arithmetic functions built in.