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My laptop history. My first laptop information carrier, after passing from 8-bit punched paper tape via 80-byte Hollerith cards and 80-Mbyte magnetic tape reels to floppies of various kinds, was an Atari ST-Book bought secondhand in 1993, a complete 8-MHz 1-Mbyte Atari ST computer in a slim, lightweight, silent form with six hours battery life, a fantastic machine. Only 400 were sold, of which two in Holland. I used mine happily to latex articles, course notes, and this website until its battery gave out in 1998. Its replacement was a many-kilo Dell Inspiron 7000 "Schlepptopf" running Redhat. It was too heavy to carry in a rugsack so that its power inlet broke from rattling on my bicycle carrier in 2002. I replaced it with a marvelous 1-kg Toshiba Portégé 2000. By that time I gave up relying on my institute's computer experts for support; instead, Debian was installed and maintained by a helpful and most knowledgeable graduate student. When the Toshiba died in 2007 from a keyboard spill, he had left to postdoc elsewhere and advised me to transfer to a Mac as "Rob-proof" unix replacement. I did so, but quickly got fed up with the MacBook Pro's unix-deviant and unix-hiding idiotsyncracies, its weight, and its bad keyboard. So, even though MacBook Pro's then became the fashion in my line of work, in March 2009 I decided to switch back to a lightweight Toshiba running straight linux. This time I dared to rely on Google alone for installation just by myself. It worked; Google may indeed replace graduate students. This post resulted from this non-trivial but eventually successful exercise. I then became much happier with the Toshiba than I ever was with the Mac; a considerable boost of my daily life.
My laptop usage.
As an astronomer I use latex for all my writing: articles (with
BibTeX, see Bibtex and ADS),
proposals, reports, course notes and problems and examinations,
letters, websites (latex2html), and talks (pdflatex). As a solar
physicist I program in IDL with the SolarSoft
library. I use emacs as editor,
mutt for email, xfig for drawing, xv for image inspection, acroread
for reading and presentations. All ancient but robust, reliable, and
thoroughly familiar. I do almost all my work, mostly reading and
writing, on my laptop, using a remote server mainly for backup and to
provide my websites (including this one) and weblinks into my work
directories for collaborators. I carry my laptop everywhere and type
(or search) notes all the time. Next to my notes, work, and a lot of
data, this veritable "information carrier" also contains thousands
of downloaded
abstracts
and hundreds of
downloaded articles
on my
research topics. I find my way in it not by GUI buttons but via the
terminal command line, using many shortcut aliases and the
locate command.