My Laptop History
I have been interested in the developments of laptops for as long as I can remember, but my real passion for them started when my mother’s work gave her a company laptop. This was only around ten years ago now, which honestly shows how young I am. It was not a very good laptop, but I got to play with it and I really enjoyed it. It was too heavy to be all that portable in my opinion, but the idea of portability. Moving computer power from place to place. Being able to use a computer in a park. The battery life on her laptop was dismal as well, so taking it to the park was no a reality either, but again, the idea of it was amazing.
Before my current laptop, I have only ever owned one other laptop, and it was not something you could just carry around from place to place, as its screen was broken, and the laptop was in Chinese. It was a Pentium II around three hundred megahertz, slower than many of today’s smartphones. It was running Windows 95. The screen was busted, but I could hook it up to a 15 inch CRT monitor that I had sitting around, and this was my first laptop. I enjoyed toying with it, and seeing how long the battery could last. I tinkered with it, to see what made it tick, and ultimately destroyed the thing as I pulled it apart.
The next laptop I got some experience with was my cousin’s machine. A Compaq from about two years ago now. A pretty nice machine. I got all excited about it, when I started playing with Netstumber. This was my first real wireless internet experience. We were at a gas station, and I remembered that we did not let my family know we were making a two hour drive to come visit them, a day earlier than they thought we would, so I noticed an open access point, opened my e-mail and sent them all an e-mail before my cousin was finished filling up the gas for the car.
Finally, I was able to get my own laptop. I had wanted one for a while, but I never had the funds, and when I bought my machine, I still did not have any money, but it became a need for the blogging that I do. I had a very short list of companies I would trust with my money, and since it was before the whole Intel processor in Apple computers thing, I got myself a nice Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T43. I am very happy with this machine, though there are still some bugs to be worked out with its power saving mode and whatnot. It’s performance beats the pants off any other laptop I have ever tried, and I can say without a doubt, other than the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo machines that are out there now, this one is one of the best.
While my laptop history is much shorter than most, I have watched on the sidelines as the industry went from being only for the elite business person, to weighing ten pounds for not much performance, to being able to fulfill just about any need or niche. I am excited to see how things progress from here, as we see everything from small 7 inch screen, almost palm sized, laptops to 20 inch screen multimedia machines that you can barely call portable.
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