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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

Who else was hacking on a Toshiba Satellite in the 90s?

Haha. My first ever non-antique laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro circa 2000. Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car. One of said fellows is apparently now running some major blockchain thought leader scammery. People don't change their colours.

Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.

> Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car... people don't change their colours.

And... what dodgy things are you currently involved in?? I'm guessing you never paid for your RAR license either. /s

about 10 years ago i finally did after using a random key for years

One of the oddities of China where I've been for ~20 years is that rar is still super popular. Never figured that one out. I guess the warez OS images bundled it years ago and it became a thing for 1.4 billion people. How's that for a marketing channel?

I worked in tech support for Winbook laptops from ~94-96 at their call center in Columbus. We had a small crew of engineers there as well and we'd regularly buy Toshibas and tear them apart just to check out the competition. They were definitely the gold standard.

Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.

Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)

I was gifted one as a 15 year old. It had 8mb of ram and spent lots of time running warcraft 2. Good times.

My first laptop for college was a Toshiba Satellite. This would have been around 2006. It was a great machine at a reasonable price. Never had any issues with it until the battery died like 8 years later.

aye. my grad school machine was a toshiba from that era. sorry to see they're out of the biz.

Tecra 500CDT for me. Dual booted Windows largely for DOS gaming, and Debian.

But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.

I had a Tecra 500CS in high school. Used to carry it in my bookbag, no case or anything. It was an absolute beast, and the first machine I ever installed Linux on - Slackware 3.4, via floppy disk sets because I couldn't afford a CD drive on top of the machine itself, which even used cost me an entire summer job's proceeds. It did have a built-in modem, though, and that sure was handy.

I suppose I shouldn't talk of it in the past tense. After all, I still have it, and it still works after all these years.

I used to always use the floppy net install image for Debian. Was magic to me that a single disk could bootstrap so much amazing stuff.

I'm pretty sure I didn't yet know Debian existed. Also, my mom would've been pissed at me tying up the phone line that long. Disks I could download piecemeal, one or two a night, while I was staying up far longer than I should to get on the MUCKs while the west coast folks were around.

My aunt got one and I helped her set it up and install software on it. These things were so cool at the time. It even had a built-in 3.5" floppy drive. I think it had a trackball and buttons instead of the touchpads we're all used to now.

Yes, my first laptop was a 320CDT which I bought when I started contracting. The first thing I did was format it and install Windows NT on it.

I had a couple of Dells after that but they never felt as robust as the Toshiba.

I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.

The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.

My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.

I hacked my way through college on a Toshiba Tecra 750... $7,500 configuration that I was able to get for $900! Probably the best laptop I owned except for my current 2015 MacBook Pro.

I came here just for this. I cherish the font ROM on these.

T1950CT for me, writing QBASIC games. Good memories.

Toshiba T3100e With batteries the size of your fist, and an orange screen. Building asm projects using masm or tasm. Good times.

I loved my Satellite Pro 4600 - circa 2001-2003. But then I was finally able to afford the ThinkPad of my dreams (a maxed out T42p).

My first laptop was a Satellite 2100 CDT

I went Toshiba -> thinkpad -> MacBook.

They were the best at the time.

Yup, T1900 handed down from an uncle, my first computer!

Present.

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