I want some coffee!

The last post caused me to plod through old memories about my own personal computers. I had a couple desktops and one tower (a Gateway IIRC), but living on a boat dictated something smaller.  My first sortie into 'portable computers' was an Osborne 1. It was new on the market having been introduced by Adam Osborne in the fall of 1981. I bought mine about Mar 1982 from a dealer who failed to mention that about 10 days later Osborne Computers would declare bankruptcy and be gone from the market. But the price was right and it worked properly. This one isn't mine but it looks identical with it's 5" screen (amber text) which displayed ASCII characters only. "Graphics? I don't need no ^(*&^%$# graphics!" The 'portable' Osborne 1 'compact computer'... all 24 lbs of it! The Osborne had 2 floppy drives but no HDD (hard disk drive). IIRC I booted up with a floppy drive which had the MS-DOS operating system on it. Adam Osborne was a tech wri...

That's what this is supposed to be. Somehow I drift off into a little bit of everything. But coffee roasting is a way of life these days. So if something goes kaput in that endeavor it's a big deal. And that's what happened. In about 2022 my trusty Samsung laptop succumbed to what was probably a virus which affected the display processor. I'd been using it daily for 5 or 6 years. As laptops go it seemed indestructible. Wrong. Again!    Dead laptops. Lots of them! No they're not all mine... a couple more than the pile on the right. I replaced the Samsung with a Lenovo which had an ARM (brand) microprocessor (vs. Intel); that lasted less than 6 months (!). The issue seemed to be construction quality of the Lenovo laptop- it became intermittent and kept rebooting after the screen suddenly went blank for a moment. If I couldn't trust it, it had to go. That led to an HP Probook. That laptop was a real work horse. Sadly work horses get viruses just like a no-name piec...