(no subject)

[ellarien]

I'm up past midnight with my laptop, dinking with datasets.

I was going to say I seem to remember doing much the same while the Berlin Wall was falling, but it doesn't fit; this was in the living room of the first rental house, with a 386SX, and in '89 I was still living in the last rental bedroom and I'm not sure laptops had been invented. Maybe that was the first Gulf War.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

The first laptops (Z-80?) were just about around then, but I'd say it's unlikely.

[ellarien]

This was a 386SX -- not mine; I think it would have cost about six months' salary at the time -- with 3Mb of RAM, 60Mb of hard drive, and a black-and-white screen. I was using Locus 123, and pushing the machine to its limits with a few dozen layers of spreadsheet.

Thinking about it, I'm fairly sure that what I'm remembering was one of the later acts in the fall of the Soviet Union -- probably the coup that had Gorbachev secluded in his holiday home and tanks on the Moscow ring road. It was happening on the radio -- no twenty-four hour TV news for me in those days.