Return of the Workstation

Sitting on the desk next to me is an honest-to-gosh A31 of 2002. This model of ThinkPad was one of the most famous and often considered to be the pinnacle of IBM's mobile workstation development. In many ways, it wouldn't be equaled until the short-lived W7xx from a few years ago and now out of production. This model would culminate two years later in 2004 with the A31p of the NASA Space Shuttle and International Space Station fame. They were pretty much as high of performance machine that a buyer could get while still using actual mobile computing parts. Of course, there were a number of machines at that time sold through secondary market channels which used desktop parts, but if you wanted an actual machine which could travel regularly, this was it! 

To start with, these machines were true "3 spindle" computers, meaning that it had the capacity to hold a hard disk drive, an optical drive, as well as a floppy. This was a form-factor that was becoming increasing rare by the first part of the new millennium, but not only did the A31 have it, the two non-HDD drive bays were swappable modular bays, capable of taking a bewildering number of devices which ranged from floppy (1.44Mb FDD, 120Mb Superdisk), optical (CD, CDRW, DVD, DVD/CDRW, DVD+RW), as well as a number of specialty items designed for the series. These included, hard drive adapter, battery, Palm Pilot sync cradle, and slide-out numeric keypad! On top of that, some models included a special USB port on top of the screen to take a webcam. Screen resolutions ran from the typical 1024 x 768 on either 14.1" or 15.1" panels, all the way up to an eye-straining 1600 x 1200.....which by the way is the same resolution as the 20" panel of my ThinkVision L200p desktop display! CPUs were mobile P4s ranging from 1.7 to 2.0Ghz, although they'll take up to the blistering (literally) 2.6Ghz chip. Although, the factory specs only listed the max RAM as 1Gb, they would take the later 1Gb modules to run a full 2Gb. The hard disk drive size was only limited to whatever you can find in size of parallel drive to purchase. For the 2002-04 era, these are almost ridiculous specs.....and that was only on the inside....

As with all professional level ThinkPads since their inception, there were expansion docks as well as simple port replicators available. The most sophisticated was the 2631, that not only included yet another, swappable modular bay, BUT the ability to add 2 PCI cards, as well as more PCMCIA slots! Configuration was limited pretty much only by the imagination of the user.
 

For NASA and the International Space Station which adopted and used them for many years, this included a wide variety of applications including docking, control of external apparatus, as well as more mundane task such as recording experimental data. 

Which gets me back to my very own little mission control here in North Texas. This particular machine had been one of my brother's old computers and came to replace my wife's aging A30 (same chassis, but PIII gen). She used it for a couple of years and it went on to become my son's to replace his first computer, an A21p. Eventually, it went on to Amarillo to a relative, where it has spent the last two years, until finally returning home this summer due to a failed CCFL. Most people might think that it's a little crazy to take a 10 year old computer and spend $30 on it to replace a screen to get it back running again, but as you can see by it's history; the A31 is kind of a special machine!

Old Cameras

 While reading another blog yesterday, I realized that I never explained how I got involved in the hobbies that I love. So, today I'm going to start with the first of a series on the "back-story". We'll start with photography because it was my first love. Way back at some point in the mid-sixties, my father taught me how to use his, then new, Voigtlander Bessamatic Deluxe.

This was quite a camera for that time; completely mechanical, not requiring a battery even for the meter which was selenium. It goes without saying that it was completely manual, but did have a "match/needle" metering arrangement. I cut my photographic teeth on that camera, up through high school. I became the school photographer my Freshman year and held that position until I graduated. Although, by the late 70's, this camera was antiquated, it did have some advantages over the more modern ones like a leaf shutter that allowed me to flash sync all the way up to 1/500. That was pretty hot stuff back in those days of the typical 1/60 sync speeds! But of course, there's a down side, and in this case of the leaf-shuttered-old-camera-pre-Internet days, it was a lack of other additional lenses.

So I went the opposite direction. After a lot of scrimping and saving, plus the participation of my brother, I bought probably THE most advanced camera of that era: the Canon A-1. It was the second (after the Minolta XD-11) camera to offer all the exposure control that is now considered the norm on SLR/DSLRs, otherwise known as PSAM (Programmed, Shutter Priority, Apeture Priority and Manual). At around the same time, I was able to convince the school to buy a Canon AE-1 to replace their old Mamiya 1000DTL. So the final two years of school photography was completed with a very up-to-date Canon rig. 

Oddly enough though, what I learned in those years of school photography was that after learning the basics of light and camera control....I rarely used automation! Most of my shooting was done in manual! In the summer before my senior year of high school, I was (as usual) haunting one of the local camera shops when I spotted way back on a dusty shelf, an old 60's rangefinder: a Canon 7s. It came with a 50mm/f1.2 and later that summer I was able to get the 35mm/f3.5 and 100mm/f4 as well. It might be the most unobtrusive camera that I've ever owned. It taught me a lot about photography and I've been trying to replicate that ever since. Between the A-1, AE-1 and 7s, I was able to delve into a professional photography (at a low level albiet), including a stint of working as a black and white darkroom tech for a studio. However, a year later, I was getting ready to go to college and came to the conclusion that if I didn't give up my cameras, it'd probably flunk out of college in short order! Thus came my photographic hiatus.

 After the better part of a decade, and several academic as well as professional twists and turns, the late 80's saw me as a history teacher/coach earning a decent living with very few responsibilities....relatively speaking. This set the stage for the Pentax Era. As luck, or fate would have it, I came across and small-out-of-the-way camera shop specializing in used equipment. After hanging around for several weeks and getting familiar with what they had, I decided that I wanted a manual "system" camera with access to easy to find, but excellent optics. Canon who didn't make what I was looking for, and Nikon who did (FM/FM2), was too expensive were eliminated. It pretty much came down to the Olympus OM-1n or the Pentax MX. Although both had very similar sizes and systems, the Olympus had a weird control layout (to me), so it was the Pentax MX, with a 50mm/f1.4 in pristine condition for $140. The next several years saw me add:

• ME Super
• Switch to black versions of the cameras.
• Winders for both cameras; always loved them and the Pentaxes were so small that they actually improved the handling.
• 12 lenses total ranging from 24mm to 200mm, a variety of zooms and ultimately a 500mm reflex lens.
• I also added a number of Sunpak flashes that would include a couple of handle-mounted "potato-mashers" 

Some time in the 80's I just about became more of a collector than a photographer. It started with a little Olympus 35RC that I found in a pawn shop for $12.

 This was followed by an Olympus OM-1 that I stumbled across at a good price.

 Within a short time, I traded this find to a woman that I was dating at the time who needed something more modern than her Exakta VX. This camera came complete with 2 lens other than the normal, as well as a waist-level finder all in a fitted leather case.

Around the same time, I came across a Voigtlander Vito B locally and was given a Rollei 35 by my brother which had a stripped nylon gear.

The downside of collecting is that you sometimes give up things that in retrospect would have been better kept. In order to finance the purchase of the Pentax system and it's array of lenses, I sold the Canon 7S which is now worth quite a lot of money, I also ended up selling the Voigtlander gear as well a few years later. Although not worth nearly what the Canon rangefinder has, it was interesting stuff and of some sentimental value as well since I learn photography on it. You live and learn I suppose......

By now it was the mid-to-late 90's and I had changed professions to IT. Through my work, I came to be in charge of all things digital there, including their array of digital cameras. Although, at this time, higher-end digital photography was in the nose-bleed realm and not all that good, I became familiar with Kodak's line of DC cameras which we were using for work. In late 2000, they brought out the DC 4800 which as a 3.1 megapixel camera which had a number of refinements that enticed regular photographers and not just "snap-shooters". So I bought an "over-stocked" one from our IT distributor for a very good price to augment, my real (film SLR) cameras. As it turned out, after a couple of years, I realized that the only pictures I was doing anything with were the digital ones! Around that time, we were moving from Chicago to Texas and it was a time for self-evaluating and deep thought. I came to the conclusion that I was really tired of carrying around a big camera bag with two cameras, 6-8 lenses and a flash in it. I was also rarely if ever taking pictures on film and when I did, I would lose the film or have it sit in the camera till I couldn't remember what was on it. Time for a change. 

So I sold everything I owned film camera-wise and what I didn't sell, I gave to my friend Pat as part of his collection. I wanted to simplify, and the then new, Nikon CoolPix 8800 seemed like a great candidate. I had previously had some experience with the CoolPix line from work when I bought the CP 4500 for our facilities folks to document work to replace their old CP 950 and also a CP 5700 for or new Media Center. The 8800 not only had a phenominal 8 megapixels, but a 10x (35-350mm, 35mm eq.) but built in VR as well. The concept was that it would do everything, all in one body and I wouldn't be saddled with carrying around a bunch of lenses, flashes, etc. any more. Plus, we had just had our first child and it would be perfect for the inevitable kid pictures.

 

Unfortunately, the photographer in me reared it's ugly head and I round the CoolPix to be VERY limiting. It was very slow (catching children at play is not), and I learned a lot about sensor size in relation to image quality and that number of pixels had little to do with good images. Unfortunately, all I learned was that I could have bought a DSLR like the D70 for the same amount I spent on the 8800 and had a better camera (although fewer pixels on a bigger sensor) for about the same amount of money! Boy, did I feel stupid. So, after some soul-searching and Internet research, I bit the bullet again and sold the 8800. Then took what I made in the deal, plus what I had saved and bought a used D70 along with the 18-200mm VR superzoom. 

This of course brings me up to present times and is a jumping off point to the other blog: The Frugal Propellerhead that documents how I've moved on through that progression of equipment.