Back in 2007 I had a "laptop crisis" in which I went from having a laptop on me at all times, to not having a laptop at all, for about a month. My home situation was pretty good, but my school situation... not so much.
I ended up doing enough of a restore of my dad's old (1989, I think?) 386 laptop and parallel Ethernet adapter. The details were something like:
1. The rechargeable battery was dead, but it was a 4.8-volt NiCad. It ran beautifully off three alkaline D batteries, strapped to the back. I just had to disconnect the batteries out whenever I had it plugged into the wall, to prevent them from charging.
2. The hard drive wouldn't spin up, so I ended up making a DOS boot disk with an SSH client (SSHDOS) and ODI drivers for the NIC, as well as the bog standard MS-DOS editor.
3. When I had Internet connectivity (read: wall proximity to Ethernet), I used SSHDOS to connect to a remote IRIX host, and used Lynx from there. Lynx was painfully slow on the 386, and SSL was right out. Not that much used it in 2007.
4. I used the MS-DOS editor as my daily-driver text editor. My workflows then, as now, are mostly text-based, so this was a pretty easy change.
Of course, I couldn't help but add a sticker to the lid: "up to 10x faster than your malware".
In 2007, I'm amazed that someone still kept an IRIX box up somewhere. I remember my uni having one around 2001, and it was regarded as positively ancient.
I've got a SGI Indigo in my mother's house.
Before the pandemic still booted. Of course I forgot the root password, but the 4GB scsi disk is still alive.
Of course the clock is somewhere in 199[2-5] because my Irix version wont' let me log in after January 1, 2000.
I ended up doing enough of a restore of my dad's old (1989, I think?) 386 laptop and parallel Ethernet adapter. The details were something like:
1. The rechargeable battery was dead, but it was a 4.8-volt NiCad. It ran beautifully off three alkaline D batteries, strapped to the back. I just had to disconnect the batteries out whenever I had it plugged into the wall, to prevent them from charging.
2. The hard drive wouldn't spin up, so I ended up making a DOS boot disk with an SSH client (SSHDOS) and ODI drivers for the NIC, as well as the bog standard MS-DOS editor.
3. When I had Internet connectivity (read: wall proximity to Ethernet), I used SSHDOS to connect to a remote IRIX host, and used Lynx from there. Lynx was painfully slow on the 386, and SSL was right out. Not that much used it in 2007.
4. I used the MS-DOS editor as my daily-driver text editor. My workflows then, as now, are mostly text-based, so this was a pretty easy change.
Of course, I couldn't help but add a sticker to the lid: "up to 10x faster than your malware".