10 October 2005
The old cat is retiring
Many friends have, during the years, witnessed my proud tinkering with an old Thinkpad 380XD: a solid brick of black plastic like only IBM used to make. Obtained in dubious circumstances involving shady working-class block basements (I actually come from the italian version of "the projects", yo niggaz) and people who had to part with it VERY fast, I kept the machine with me for a good 6 years. I discovered today that it's actually a 1998 model, making it an almost 7-year old piece of hardware... I brought it with me to Milan, Preston, London and eventually Manchester; I pumped up his muscles with a whopping 64mb RAM expansion, added a PCMCIA modem (broken), PCMCIA ethernet (smashed) and even a CardBus wireless network card. I made it run Slackware Linux, Mandrake, Knoppix and Debian, hopelessly trying to move him away from the dreadful Win98 he used to conspire with, but he's never really forgiven me for that; he even killed a drive that I had to replace with an even bigger one (6Gb). The relationship between us was like a typical long-married couple: bitching and screaming for the sake of it, any hope of productivity simply dropped, appearances be damned. He tolerated my short love affairs with younger, more fancyful and fragile machines, and I kept coming back to him, time and time again...Eventually I got myself a new companion that was everything he wasn't (an HP model! what an insult for an old-school IBM) and he gave itself away to bad friends... he's not been himself since. I made several attempts at teaching him new tricks, planning to keep him as some kind of post-modern sound system, elegant linux-powered multimedia hub with that chic 90s look; but he refused to budge, making up excuses at every turn, cutting all his interfaces to avoid talking to me. I left him alone for a while, as he wanted, but I secretly hoped he'd come to reason sooner or later...
Today, the last one. Here in Chorlton, where old people from the Manchester area come to die and go to church, his hard-disk broke down again. I'm not going to buy a new one again. I have to say farewell to an old friend that will never come back, a piece of hardware from the disappeared era of proud American engineering. Thinkpads are now a 100% Chinese business, another story of the US imperial twilight, and he wasn't made for a world of linux guerrilla resistance. I understand.
Goodbye, old friend; I'm sure you'll be happy up there, joking with some old Apple or Commodore veteran...
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