How old skool is your IT?

IN THIS VIRTUAL space last week I listed, in what was another meticulously researched piece, the INQUIRER Top 5 Next Big Things That Weren't.

This being The INQUIRER, rabble-rousing readers insisted on having their say, baying for blood at the gates of our vast estate until the dogs had to be set on them.

Eventually the fuss died down and turned into a desultory trickle of emails questioning your correspondent's parentage. What surprised us most was not so much the Transmeta and Segway fanatics but the fact that IBM's OS/2 still seems to be able to provoke a response and still has its users.

Peter Nicholls, a solicitor, wrote in to say that he still uses the ancient operating system. I suggested that he must still be involved in the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce and Peter wrote back to list his doddering rig: a dual-Pentium Pro Overdrive PC running OS/2 with Describe, FaxWorks and WordPerfect for DOS 6.2.

Laughing him off as a harmless eccentric I happened a few days later to lunch with another solicitor who owned up to also being an OS/2 user. But even he couldn't compete with the acid-house, mullet-hair generation system that Peter was running. Is is a legal thing or are there millions of you out there with prehistroic kit, turning ablind eye to the age of 64bits, Vista and 3D GUIs?

We want to hear about your thrifty old-skool setups. Bring us your details of amber-on-black screens, daisywheel printers, tales of maintaining WordStar versions from the days when the iron curtain was still there and U2 were hip. Pictures will gain you extra points, assuming you can still take a picture with your Box Brownie.

The best three entries get a mystery prize. µ

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INQUIRER Top 5 Next Big Things That Weren't