On Sat, Jun 08, 2019 at 11:12:14AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 4:44 AM Tomasz Rola <rto...@ceti.pl> wrote: > > > > > Measured purely on clock speed and RAM, my current cellphone (2017 model) > > > has better specs than my last laptop (2012 model). > > > > On a paper, sure. > > > > I am not going to quarrel about personal preferences, but for any non > > trivial use, I am afraid the differences start to manifest. > > > > Not arguing with this, which is why I phrased my comment the way I did. > > OTOH, even for "serious" work, an example: the first member of this list > has been using a smartphone to telnet/ssh into servers to do various things > since at least the dot.com boom era of 1999.
I recall few decent machines from that era, even thou I never had one. Psion, HP Jornada series, and to much lesser extent Nokia 9xxx - by the time I could afford it, they were end-of-lifed by their respective makers. I would love to have such a machine even today, no problem with slow CPU (Jornada's 166MHz, 200MHz or Psions 36MHz if memory serves - but such a lovely keyboard!!! - and one could run Emacs on them). Alas, those were dying products, end of line. They would have worked for ten years with good care, but nothing good enough to replace them after that. In my opinion smart phone is not good enough, but may be choosen because there is nothing else to choose from. There are some mini-pc-laptop kind of machines, I am not sure how good they actually are - in order to be acceptable for me they have to boot from disk/ssd/sdcard with adapter and be 386 or amd64 compatible :-) . I most probably will set for small factor used laptop. Easy to find replacement/parts, etc. Tried 12-inch Thinkpad x61, this one was good, but sister robbed me of it. Now I am afraid to buy another one :-). But when I think about it working in b/w console mode I get shivers. Netbook was nice alternative while it was, but I think this is another dead end, judging by what I can buy (or rather, cannot)... BTW Psion, during its last days, created great mini-laptop and called it Netbook, too. Wonderful stuff, once again never replicated (to my knowledge) during next twenty years. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
