Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

"The tools and tricks that let Ars Technica function without a physical office" - Looking at the “future of work” with a team that’s been living it for two decades: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/no-office-no-problem-how-ars-technicas-remote-workers-work/

sometimes when searching for niche tech, you come across what can only be described as technological shitposts:

#til among the many simple things you could do in outlook express that you can't do in the #windows 10 mail app is forward a message as an attachment. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/apps_windows_10-outlook_mail/windows-10-mail-forward-as-attachment/e9a87269-c211-413e-b293-128f6ea8225b

my customer has the user's guide that came with microsoft word 2.0 for windows way back in 1991. it's an 800-page tome. fast forward 28 years, & neither word nor the rest of the still-expensive microsoft office suite come with manuals anymore.

i just turned on a customer's laptop for the first time in months. the battery was completely drained, so i had to find & plug in their charger. after the laptop powered on, windows immediately logged off & shut down.

why?

because the laptop lid was closed right after the owner clicked on shutdown. windows stopped the shutdown & went into sleep mode instead, so it didn't finish shutting down until today, & it stayed in sleep mode until it drained the battery.

default windows behavior.

oh, btw, why i was hired to replace the battery: in the 100, the ram doubles as semi-permanent storage like a disk drive, & the ni-cad battery is what preserves it when it's turned off. when it fails, a symptom is random memory corruption even after a cold start.

i repaired vintage computers before, but up to now they were all mine, so it wasn't really a profession. now, after thorough testing of the Model T in my care, i can at last call myself a PROFESSIONAL vintage computer repair tech. *level-up.wav*

today, my computer fairy wand is on: someone else's TRS-80 Model 100.

the soldered-on nicad battery needs to be replaced. the original's been in there since 1983.

They introduced it with a Macromedia Flash Player animation channeling School House Rock. The original has been lost to time because Flash is dying & the server with the loading content is long since dead, but not before being captured & uploaded to YouTube. It was called "Get Perpendicular": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II

In 2005, Hitachi claimed advancing hard disk storage density with what it called Perpendicular Magnetic Recording in its Deskstar line and embedded Microdrive: https://web.archive.org/web/20110711171907/https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/index.html

But that's only the context for what I wanted to share.

How did we arrive in the timeline where a pocket computer a million times more powerful than the first supercomputers is simultaneously the single slipperiest personal possession AND the single most fragile personal possession?

Guess what just broke, how it broke, & what parts suffered the most damage.

If I accidentally dropped a 20th Century portable computer gadget from waist high, it would usually survive either completely undamaged or with light cosmetic damage.

If I accidentally drop a 21st Century portable computer gadget from waist high, it's destroyed beyond repair.

@Chipper hey there! glad to see you made it!