Two IBM Stinkpads die on me in a week

MY TRUSTY IBM Butterfly 701c decided to throw a wobbly this week and it seems like there's little I can do to save it.

After rescuing it from my cupboards in a throw out session which saw 20 odd years of computing bric-a-brac consigned to the dung hill, I powered up the 701c, which suffered cruel and unusual treatment at the hands of the polizei at a CeBIT in Hangover some years ago.

Alas, the creature only boots intermittently and when we say intermittently it's about once every 30 attempts. The Butterfly has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in my hands. Heck, the CPU was even "upgraded" to an AMD chip.

If I could get my mitts on a copy of the hardware manual I'd have a go at fixing it myself, such is my affection for this 1995 "road warrior".

The case of the 240 is quite different. Looks like the Travelstar hard drive has given up the ghost. A hardware manual is available for that, but the cut-down machine lacks floppy to boot, so there will have to be quite a bit of jiggery and pokery to get an OS running on a replacement hard drive, I expect.

I'd booted the machines to see if I could recover data from the old contemptibles. In particular, it appeared I was missing one - just one specialised font which I need for a heap of documents. I've still got the original 5.25-inch floppy with the font I need on it. But how the heck to get that when even 3.5-inch drives are getting long in the tooth?

I risked life and limb for the sake of one piddly font. The cupboards behind me were very scary because they were full to the brim with nearly 30 years of computing history - at times the "killer applications" - PowerBuilder and Paradox for DOS threatened to fall out every time I opened the door and brain me.

I staved them off, to dig deeper. I knew there would be riches beyond the dreams of avarice under the dross and DOS for that matter.

Obviously I discovered relics that time forgot, such as my IBM Butterfly 701C notebook plus a strange manual and a bag that seemed to indicate I once owned a "Librex" - although the machinery appears to have corroded into nothing. And also two early Gateway machines, both of which booted when power was applied. I won't mention the various OS/2 bags I found, nor the original Windows 95 collection, nor the various diskettes from yesteryear for Windows for Warehouses (WfW), DR DOS, and strange pictures of people who used to work for old firms such as DEC, Tandem, and others.

But the real treasure was the discovery of paper notebooks from yesteryear - which I almost tossed in the bin. Reporter notebooks should be kept for seven years and a day and be dated, in case under the arcane British laws you are hauled up in front of a beak and asked to explain your story.

As you've probably guessed by now, only I can really read my brand of ersatz shorthand, but I was astonished to read again Lee Reiswig telling me just how good OS/2 was, not that long before it hit Warp Factor 2 and then disappeared into the Klingon wastes. µ

See Also
IBM Butterfly Thinkpad rescued from trash