Wed Sep 15 1999

Free Hardware !!

Right, here's the fucking deal.

I've got a piece of shit 386 that I'm trying to turf. I think its got a 40Mb hard drive and about 4Mb of RAM, though they might be excessive estimates. It's got a huge (bulky) monochrome monitor that looks like something out of 'Dr. Who' (at least it would if you sprayed it silver). This thing had trouble running ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset) -- you may remember me playing with this at a Linux Party a while ago.

You can think of owning this machine as a learning experience. I dump it on you, and you learn what its like to have a 20kg paperweight sitting on your dresser for the next six months.

I'd strip it for parts, but once you take into account the wear that opening it up would incur on a screwdriver, I'd probably lose out. If I recall correctly, the hard drive is MFM (or I might be confusing it with another piece of shit I own) and the RAM probably doesn't work with anything else made this millenium. I tried carbon-dating the motherboard, and found out it was likely produced in the ancient lost city of Atlantis, which would explain why the manual is full of pictures of fish and drowning people.

This machine would be perfect for any obsessive idiot hardware junkie, or someone interior-decorating a furniture showroom or satellite groundstation. If you choose to take it off my hands and I'm in a good mood, I'll buy you a drink. If you can't tell by the tone of this email, I'm in a good mood now.

Hurry! Act now before I throw it off a bridge.

K.

Postscript: yes, someone took it :)

Copyright © 1995-2010 Conrad Parker <conrad@vergenet.net>. Last modified Tue Feb 19 2002