Laptops

A Personal History

My very first laptop was a vintage Packard Bell 486x black and white screen model called the Diplomat. It was so small, they had to bolt on a floppy drive and a trackball. I wrote half of my first novel, Starstrikers on that laptop while deployed to Operation Southern Watch. It was super thin but also very sluggish. It had Windows 3.1 and I believe Word 6 on it. I think this was in the early 1990’s.

I don’t recall ever owning another laptop until I purchased my one-and-only MacBook, the original white plastic model with the IBM CPU. Below is a picture of it while writing my first Mystery novel in 2007.

I used that laptop until the plastic literally disintegrated. After Apple disowned it, I ran Linux on it for a few more years.

My next laptop was the first Dell 13” XPS. I wrote at least a few novels on that before it eventually needed replacing. It ran Ubuntu Linux and I was very happy to be on an open source OS again. This one would burn your lap because the fan vented down on it. Dumb.

My next laptop was from a small US manufacturer in Denver, called System76. I believe that was in 2017. Got lots of mileage from that one.

When the System76 laptop died, I went back and got another one. Note the Ubuntu key instead of Windows key. I ran Ubuntu on it and later on I ran their own flavor of Linux - Pop! OS.

When that one eventually died, I was forced to buy an HP laptop by my then employer, with silver keys that could not be seen. I never really liked that one much, despite how cool it thought it was.

Every laptop I’ve used since 2015 has had Linux on it. I limped along with the HP laptop until last year when it died and I finally moved up to a Lenovo ThinkPad. I’m hoping that this one will last long into my retirement. I really don’t want to buy another laptop.

I hope you enjoyed this historical look at the machines I wrote most of my novels and short stories on. I stopped using desktop PCs around the time I started writing. Have not used one since then.