[wbill]

Yup, any home-type equipment can be twitchy. It should last for more than 3 days, though. :-)

So much of it, truly, is just becoming disposable. I saw mini-laptops at Target just the other day, on sale for $149. At that price, it's cheaper to throw away than have fixed, or even waste your own time on fixing.

Amazing, to me at least. First "portable" that I worked on weighed 50-75 lbs and sold for upwards of 5 grand. It was portable, only in the broadest sense of the word, lol. Needed two men and a small gorilla to move the thing around.

[jagusafr]

Ah, the Compaq “luggable” with the keyboard that fastened over the screen. I used one in law school (mid-80s) and was one of very few people who had access to a computer. My dad, who graduated a few years before I did, bought an IBM PC for ten grand when they first came out because he was a one-man office. A great head start in those days.

Colonel, USAFR

[Myrddin]

I sold the first 5 TRS-80 Model I computers at the Radio Shack in Mission Valley in August 1977. I wasn't much interested in them at the time. A couple months later, I was working on a SatNav using an HP2100 computer. All toggle switch control panel to enter the "bootstrap" code into the core memory so the cassette tape drive could be activated to read in the next phase of the boot. Primitive. Certainly a 3 or 4 person job to cart that hardware on/off the tuna boat.

I still have one of those "portable" TRS-80 Model 4 machines...and a Model 16 (68000) running Xenix. Dinosaurs, but still functional.