My first laptop was a Dell 320N, which I recently recovered from where it’s been gathering dust for over a decade. When I first unpacked it I found that it was reporting read errors from the hard disk, so I was going to start over and install linux on it. Luckly, having taken it to pieces (which was tough – the secret to removing the 320′s case is to undo the screws hidden under the rubber base) I found that there was a dusty pin on the IDE connector, and having fixed that it booted fine.
I am proud to say that booting up into DOS (and then Windows) brought back all the excitement I remember feeling 15 years ago at the power at my fingertips in such a small package.
The 320 runs an AMD 386 at a whopping 20MHz clockspeed (that’s roughly 300 times slower than my current laptop) – giving up to 10MIPS (Mega Instructions Per Second) – roughly 2,250 times less than my current laptop. With the extension module giving me 2 MB of RAM, and a 30Mb hard disk, I felt like I had enough power to do anything I could dream of (Although I never bought the Maths Coprocessor)
Having booted it up I couldn’t help but try out my favorate game – “SkiFree”. This skiing game really packed a punch (notice the screen colours are inverted to increase readability)
