The Unix curmudgeon and the nice person are on a road show again, traveling back to Montana to take care of business: real estate, visit clients, and taking care of the off-the-grid cabin. As usual, we make space in the car for the computer, as we have for more than 20 years. In the beginning, it was a business necessity, but now having a computer or smart phone is almost essential for the traveler.
My first traveling computer was a TI-40 Compact Computer, a one-line LCD display programmed in BASIC, not much bigger than a large calculator, that I bought in an after-Christmas closeout in January 1985.
Our first true full “portable” computer was a luggable 8086 Sperry Portable, which had a 5-inch CRT and weighed about 40 pounds. It spent a lot of its life with us as an RS-232 serial terminal, but worked fine with a modem, too. It spent so much time at the project room in grad school that the University slapped a property sticker on it, because I couldn’t lug it back and forth all the time. For some reason, we never got around to giving it a name. It ran MS-DOS4 and had only floppy drives. I bought it used–it had belonged to a computer training company and they stripped the hard drives out before liquidating them.
The second portable was duncan, an NCR pen-top computer that ran Windows for Pen 1.0. It was a 386 machine, with a 20MB hard drive. I packed a full-sized keyboard and a Telebit QBlazer modem on road trips with that one. Airport security didn’t like it very much, because it was odd. It got a name because I used UUPC, a shareware port of UUCP to MS-DOS, so it sent and received email over the modem, exchanging with our Coherent (Unix ‘clone’) machine at home.
Our first true laptop computer was darek, a CTX700 with a 200MHz Pentium MMX, 40MB of RAM (a major upgrade from 8MB), and a 2GB hard drive. It came with Windows 95, but spent most of its life running Red Hat Linux 5 or SuSE 6, so it was our first Unix machine on the road. It went everywhere, and I even used it in flight a few times, but, I had to put the screen on my lap and touch-type with the keyboard against my chest. It got too small to run regular distributions anymore, so had to be retired, finally. It had a 56KB modem internal and a 10BaseT Ethernet, with interchangeable CD, floppy, and battery modules. You could run it with the CD, with a Floppy, with both on AC, or with two batteries for extended run and no peripherals.
With no budget for a new laptop, I built a Mini-ITX-based portable, named “nikita,” with a CD and 80GB hard dirve, using a 15-inch LCD monitor and a laptop-sized USB keyboard, but the VIA C3 chipset DMA was unstable, which meant it couldn’t run a lot of things at the same time without crashing. The machine got FreeBSD installed on it, a second Ethernet card, and became the router for our home network, which it handled quite well. After five years of faithful service, it did not survive the move to Washington. Sometimes hard drives seize up if allowed to get cold.
Our current road machine is an HP Compaq Presario 714NR, which came with Windows Vista on it, and now runs Ubuntu 9.10, having been upgraded every six months since Ubuntu 7.10. It has had a bit of memory transfusion, too, up to 2GB and begging for more. It’s got 100BaseT Ethernet and an 802.11G wireless, and an 80GB hard drive, with DVD-R/W. The big issue with this machine is the Broadcom wireless, which has been problematic for Linux, but finally seems to be under control. Having a dual-core CPU helps a lot, but more RAM is needed. The laptop has become a primary machine, at least until the recession recedes, but it is essential to have everything available on the road.
Travel in the 21st century means staying at motels that have free wi-fi, seeking out coffee shops with wi-fi, and war-driving in small towns while on the go or staying at places without network connections. I’ve been writing this in motels and by grabbing wireless where I can. It has become inconceivable to travel any distance without having access to the Internet and one’s files. The cloud is becoming a repository for a lot of data that we used to have to synch between machines before going off on a trip. As much as I use the laptop as a primary computer, I still need more power in my office to do “real” work, i.e., clustering, testing with alternate OSes, etc.
One issue with travel is keeping track of your things. Like our tandem bicycle, I never let the laptop out of my sight. There’s a lot of data in there, and a lot of inconvenience to lose your computing power. I do a backup before heading out, but that doesn’t help on the road. A better solution is to have a portable backup disk and keep it separate from the laptop. Our situation is a bit peculiar, too, as we can’t readily replace a Linux laptop if it fails or goes on walkabout without permission. Keeping a distro CD handy (again, in another bag) is an option, but inconvenient.
The Internet is essential business and situational intelligence. The ability to look at real-time weather condtions on the mountain pass ahead is invaluable, as is the access to up-to-date maps and geographic databases. I searched in vain for a place that wasn’t listed in my 3-year-old GPS database (too cheap to upgrade–bad mistake), but readily found it once I was able to “jack in” to the Internet on the laptop.
It’s been a strange 25 years to go from having essentially a programmable calculator to help with fuel and schedule management to running a business on the road out of a briefcase stuffed with what would have been a large mainframe in 1985.