My First Windows/Linux Laptop

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AI-Assisted Windsurf IDE on bottom, Windows 95 Loading Slackware 96 on the top. (Patrick Volkerding built Slackware so its improved LISP interpreter could help his university's AI research.)

This Thinkpad 701C was my first Windows laptop. A pile of floppies brought it from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. I installed Slackware 96 and it became my first Linux laptop so when RedHat and Canonical employment applications asked how many years of Linux experience I had… would you believe 30?

The rubberized finish turned to goo, its AA-NiCd system battery is dead and disposed, its CMOS/clock battery dead, its folding "Butterfly" keyboard is sluggish and its LCD screen developed a vertical hold problem reminiscent of pre-1970s televisions.

https://youtube.com/shorts/HgSEOVcKkQs?feature=share

Sometimes I booted it to view family gifs and the first emails and voicemails from the beautiful person I married. But with my 24.9 year Sun/Oracle career ending and us being forced to move house for the first time in 11 years, it's time to remove personal data and pass this on to a collector who can repair and enjoy it. Setting it up for selling has been a fun blend of digital archaeology and nostalgia.

After getting past LiLo boot error and a filesystem unhappy about being bounced between 1984 and 2026 I was able to bring up An X11 desktop on Linux 2.0.0 and a 75MHz 486DX. Is that the OpenLook window manager?

One thing I don't miss about Windows 95 is having to reboot after every network or hardware change.

One thing I don't miss about Linux 2.0.0: bash# df -h df: illegal option — h Try 'df — help' for more information. bash# df Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/hda2 85968 67911 4118 95%

(Back when Linux had no intention to give you any answers in human-readable format. We took our filesystems sizes in blocks and we liked it!)

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