My Netbook…. 15 Years Ago

Here's a picture of my new netbook, a 10.1" Acer Aspire One D250 side by side with my first notebook I bought 15 years ago. Sizes are quite similar but the interior is quite different. 1 GB of RAM vs. 8 MB, 160 GB hard drive vs. 20 MB, 386 processor running at a couple of MHz against an Intel Atom running at over 1 GHz. About two orders of magnitude apart from each other. Of course, 15 years ago it wasn't called a netbook, even though my 14.4 kbit/s Modem (external) was start of the art then. Surprisingly, the 15 year old notebook still works. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 boot in a matter of seconds, out of the 8 MB of memory, 5 MB are free once the OS is loaded and Microsoft Word loads faster than anything I have seen in the past decade. Sounds all nice but I don't want to go back. It's just a bit more comfortable today and I am not sure the old Compaq could handle a 6 MBit/s DSL line. After all, at that speed the hard drive would be full in less than a minute 🙂