I've been trying to buy a PS/2 Model 25 on ebay for years because they're among the precious few all-in-one PCs ever made, plus they're first-party IBM *and* they're tiny. they rarely show up however and when they do they're usually trashed.
Two showed up on ebay a few days ago and I had to scramble to figure out what their specs were. In the process I found out that most model 25s are even worse than i thought
I hadn't been quite sure what specs they ever had, but I wasn't too concerned, it's a novelty more than anything. Still, once I got into it I discovered that they made three models - 8086s, 286s and 386s, all of which look exactly identical
The 8086 ones sometimes have monochrome displays (ouch!!) and the color models have MCGA which is like VGA but worse, with no EGA modes (ouch!!!!!)
well unsurprisingly the 8086 models seem to be the most common, and that just sucks - I don't want a machine that has basically no standard video modes
the 286s had VGA, but the 286 was a horrible CPU - it was such a failure intel cancelled the x86 line and it only got restarted because of some enterprising engineers who partially skunkworks-ed the 386 together. i don't want to spend $250 on a machine with no virtual 8086 mode.
then there's the 386 models, the 8086-SX, which have been LGRed into oblivion. so the options end up being
- 8086 with horrible incompatible graphics modes
- 286 with VGA for $200 (oof)
- 386 with VGA but it's $650 (OOF)
i'm bummed! i want a little all in one PC! there were so few ever made! I already have the Compaq CDS524 but it's pretty big and has an ugly screen.
if anyone has a model 25 they want to part with let's talk, price might be right. only thing i don't want is a monochrome one, and if it's mcga i'm gonna lowball you haha.
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you won't find anything really interesting coming from nearly any media business because their revenue sources aren't "put out interesting writing which people can only get here, so they have to subscribe." now it's... god, I don't even know.
the way things sucked before was so interesting, and now it all sucks in the same way.
it's always the same thing. every day, the same thing. everything is bad for the same reasons. I used to complain about businesses. I gave up. There's no point. It's always the same explanation, and everyone already knows what it is.
thinking about how we've fallen so far from gods light. in 1994, a pc magazine writer tasked with covering doom bit their lip, thought a little, and said "i should put a complete map editing tutorial in there. maybe next to the cheat codes"
let me tell you why the future we live in sucks so much dog shit every single second of every single day: data. as recently as the 2000s, businesses were stumbling through life completely lost and had no idea what they were doing. now they know, and everything sucks
do you fucking know how many people got paid anywhere from a living wage to big bucks to sit around and "i don't know, do something", and then nobody knew how to figure out if the thing they did made any money, or in fact, if they did it at all?
I haven't even hit 100k subscribers and this is what my inbox looks like. every day i get emails
I now receive multiple shill offers daily. Most are "from" electronics "manufacturer" storefronts on amazon that likely do not exist as anything more than a sheet of paper in a government office in China and one of hundreds of rollstamps at a factory in Shenzhen.
I can't figure out the scam, honestly. I'm positive these "businesses" don't exist in any meaningful way - all the six-letter names you see on Amazon and Aliexpress cannot have staff and offices. There have to be millions of them, it's unthinkable.
so it turns out that the rubberized coating on the Latitude E6420 is not the only thing that high-test isopropyl dissolves. it strips the paint right off the plastic.
well, nothing to do but to do it
the upper 2" of paint are absolutely nuclear-grade. must be baked on there from years of heat, took as long to remove 1/3 of that part as it took to strip the whole rest of the thing