my dream pc | a rickety bridge of unattainable crossing
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I used to be in an electronics retailer that does not exist anymore, like Radio Shack or Circuit Metropolis. I used to be simply in there to go searching, wasn’t intending to purchase something, when one of many clerks approaches me and asks in the event that they may also help. As a joke, I requested if that they had a Lappy 486, one of many computer systems Robust Unhealthy used to test his emails in Homestar Runner.
The clerk smirked. “You are in luck, we nonetheless have one in inventory.” They unlocked a glass case behind the counter and pulled out a field. It was $450, which I couldn’t afford, however I purchased it as a result of it was a once-in-a-lifetime alternative. “This factor would not exist,” I reassured myself, “As soon as I am finished messing with it I can most likely promote it on ebay for twice that.”
I obtained it residence and began wanting on the documentation. It was launched as limited-edition H*R merch in 2011. It was an all-plastic beige field that was fairly a bit chunkier than the Lappy from the cartoons, though it was a lot lighter than it seems to be, as a result of it had modern-for-2011 elements inside. It seemed like one of many previous Tandy laptops which might be virtually too large to really use on one’s lap:
Besides as an alternative of an LCD, it had an intense inexperienced LED show meant to evoke the inexperienced phosphor show of previous monochrome CRTs. On the built-in display you can play numerous Homestar Runner-themed textual content adventures, with crude however charming ASCII graphics and brief PC speaker ditties.
For those who flip the “TV” change, to my astonishment, it used a built-in RF modulator to broadcast a sign to your TV. No wires wanted, simply flip your TV to channel 3 and the image would seem. I speculated that this is the reason the gadget was so uncommon, the FCC certainly would not enable this type of factor to be bought. However I used to be certain that in present-day no person would care concerning the interference. In TV mode, the video games had graphics however they had been nonetheless crude, on par with what you see within the Mario Paint animations (youtube.com.) It had full MIDI sound and occasional digitized speech samples.
Questioning what else I may do with the pc, I booted up a thumb drive with a linux installer — the one inputs or outputs had been a 3½” floppy drive and a USB port — and obtained to the step of the installer the place it was getting ready to partition the laborious drive. I spotted with a sudden shock that I wanted to picture the drive earlier than I did something else with the pc, I may need the one one in all these in existence, there have been zero references to the pc on-line, not even on the H*R wiki… however I did not have the instruments I wanted to picture the drive and I spent all my cash on the pc. I used to be dismayed on the thought that my solely selection could be to promote the pc, and I could not assure that whoever purchased it will launch the contents of the drive. The world would possibly by no means see the misplaced H*R video games that had been on it. In despair, I awoke ????