I have had severe asthma since puberty. After a decade of suffering, good drugs arrived around the turn of the century, and I've been well controlled since and I've been pretty active.
But I am better at altitude. I have narrow obstructed tubes in my lungs. Thinner air flows through them more easily. The higher I am (on land, obviously) the more easily and efficiently I can breathe.
In the old days, asthma clinics were located up mountains for this reason.
I like spending time at altitude. Thinner air means more oxygen for me, which means I feel better and can be more active.
If I could live 3-4 km up all the time, without vast expense in somewhere tiny, I would.
I have an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with full-travel keys, a built-in trackpoint, 3 physical buttons, and no trackpad. It cost me about £60 new, 3 years ago.
I use it with my MacBook Air when travelling, and a cheapo external USB-C screen with a broken laptop mount.
The MBA is slim, light, and 3 years on, its battery still lasts several days. It's perfectly able to do 8-10 hours of near-continuous use. But the keyboard and trackpad are awful.
So, external keyboard, external screen, pocket USB-C hub to connect them, which also gives me a spare full-size USB port and Ethernet.
If you don't need the battery life, I suggest investigating a ?20 era Thinkpad.
The X220 is quite portable and though the screen is small the keyboard is great and the range of ports good.
The T420 is moderately portable, has a decent screen and the i7 has a discrete GPU. Works surprisingly well with Wayland these days.
The W520 is not really portable at all but has a lovely big screen, tonnes of ports, and quad-core models have 4 SO-DIMM slots so 24 GB is cheap and 32 GB doable.
For all, get an i7 model, fit 2 SSDs and max out the RAM, and the result is perfectly usable in 2026 if you're a gamer or "influencer" who needs to edit video.
Cost, £200 or so.
And there's the 701 DS which has 2 screens, a numeric keypad, and a Wacom tablet built in.
You jogged my memory and I downloaded it, after a small detour trying to find a version that'll run on my 11YO iMac.
I have a whole collection of feeds alread, which I have no knowledge of at all. Many I've never even heard of. Is this a default thing, or was I accidentally bookmarking RSS feeds or something years ago and never knew?
Well, it was a breath of fresh air after even 3.0 let alone Windows 2.
But personally, I enjoyed NT 3.1 more. Built-in PPP so I could dial up to CompuServe and get on the Net. Not the web, which barely existed yet, but the Internet. Grab my email at the same time as I downloaded some files over FTP and grabbed the latest from my newsgroups.
At the same time, I had all of MS Office open, and a few command prompts, and a connection to the big office VAX watching that it was happy...
I enjoyed taunting Amiga owners about Real Multitasking on Windows. :-D I was about 25 at the time, in my defence.
> IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.
Kinda sorta but this misses context.
> we got long filenames
Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.
> a built-in network stack
No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...
But you hint at the important bit...
> no more Trumpet WinSock
Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.
WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)
Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.
I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.
What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.
Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.
I lost a Nationwide Building Society account I've had for forty years last year because the bank bought some extremely poor online-ID-verification system.
The bank forgot it had customers in a Crown Dependency. It forgot those countries issues their own ID, their own passports, their own drivers' licences. It forgot it closed its branches in those countries: it told me I had to go into my branch. My nearest branch is a £200 airfare away. It was not paying, naturally.
The crappy online-verification tool only recognises UK documents. It can't handle Isle of Man ones. They did not think.
Absolutely -- and at different rates.
I have had severe asthma since puberty. After a decade of suffering, good drugs arrived around the turn of the century, and I've been well controlled since and I've been pretty active.
But I am better at altitude. I have narrow obstructed tubes in my lungs. Thinner air flows through them more easily. The higher I am (on land, obviously) the more easily and efficiently I can breathe.
In the old days, asthma clinics were located up mountains for this reason.
I like spending time at altitude. Thinner air means more oxygen for me, which means I feel better and can be more active.
If I could live 3-4 km up all the time, without vast expense in somewhere tiny, I would.
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