On Tue, 29 Dec 1998, Max Sawicky wrote:
> Psychic Life of Power (hereafter, 'PLOP'),
Damn, Max, I wish I'd thought of that.
I'm going out with my computer illiterate father to buy a computer for my parents. My mother wants to "earn how to se a computer for work" (?) and my dad wants to play on the internet, although he won't admit it. They are looking for something very very cheap. Does anyone have any suggestions. We're looking for a PC.
Thanks, Frances -------------------------------------------------
Judging from your e-mail address <chuma.cas.usf.edu> are you in the Bay Area, at Univ of San Francisco? If so the cheapest place I know is Fry's down in Fremont, but in SF try San Francisco Computer on 7th and Geary. In the Easy Bay try Umiracle on San Pablo near Marin. But look through MicroTimes and Computer Currents first--both are free at places that sell computers. I would use these advertising mags to figure out what you really want before you go shopping.
For the techno beanies out there.
I managed to find a 486 with a monitor and modem for free. Thanks go to Doug Keachie (on another list) for the monitor and thanks to my UK exiled boss John Cains for the box--he hates computers. The people in the accounting office stuffed this box on a shelf in backroom storage with the old invoices and other junk. They got new machines sometime before I got there.
The 486 came with 16Mb of RAM to which I added 4Mb from my work buddy Larry Guevarra. So starting with an 'Uncle Ralph's' machine, a 14.4 modem, and an equally obscure VGA card, I managed to chase down enough information on the web to find the modem initialization string, the VGA card specs and the monitor specs--there were no little hardware booklets around for any of this. The monitor was a small PS/2 IBM with only the vertical refresh rate on the back label. The modem model number was Practical Peripherals 1440 from which I gathered 14.4. I should mention that the monitor was San Francisco School District junk and the memory came from piles of such from the Oakland School District junk. Both systems have obviously upgraded, following Evil Bill into consumer hell.
So, with this hardware the next step was to make a boot floppy off my existing box, but I wanted the latest releases to play with, so I downloaded the latest version of the boot floppy from:
You have to test the modem to make sure it works and can log on to an ISP using AT commands. The boot and download process expects a working modem, an ISP account and a DNS address. The next step is simple. You put the floppy in and turn on the computer. Up comes the installation shell. After configuring the hardrive, keyboard map, mouse port, modem port, and selecting the parts of the software system to download, you switch to a different screen (hit F2) and start the modem and ISP pop account. Then switching back to select the installation media, in this case ftp. Since it was a slow machine and even slower modem, it took about seven hours to download, compile, and install. I started this at night and woke in the morning with a brand new Unix system running X-Windows.
I shouldn't minimize the struggle. This was killer difficult and took a
year to learn how to do.. But once over the hurdles it is possible to get a computer for free and get it up and running as a fully functional system. So, since I now have two computers the next trip is to figure out how to get a unix network up and running.
Chuck Grimes