I bought my brand newrefurbished IBM ThinkPad 390 six years ago. While its hardware may be laughable by the current standards – PII-266, 192MB RAM, 4GB HDD – it was my computer where I started developing for FFmpeg. GCC compiling libavcodec/motion_est.c was the reason for adding 128MB to original 64MB of RAM. IIRC, all of codecs development till 2006 GSoC (VC-1 decoder) was done on it.
When I moved to MacMini, it still served me – as a router (it’s hard to see COM port on modern hardware, so modem was connected to TP390, later it was ADSL modem and second PCMCIA network card), as an x86 platform (mostly for running IDA and binary codecs) and for Internet-related stuff (cvs and git server, mail fetching, small web server, downloader and such).
Here’s how it looked for the last years:
Rest in peace.
Now I have Asus EEE 701 working instead of it. Since it’s more compact, I can also fit BeagleBoard on the table next to it.
Arh….. not happy, Kostya if you have told us that upgrading your antique computer would speed up your coding work on Rv40, I ( or we ) could have make up some good enough donation for you to even get a Quad Core….
One of the interesting thing ( or fact ) i notice is that the world dogs, or consumers, tend to have such powerful computers while the one who generally works on it and need more demanding machines ( programmers ) tend to have 4 – 5 years old computer to do their work……..
Another note… Why the heck is the BeagleBoard so expensive? Honestly that think looks like a Sub $100 broad, and should have cost only $119 – 129…..
Well, personally I find restrictions to be rather stimulating. If it works fast enough for me why should I try to optimize it? The same with graphics – in era on palettized low-res graphics artists cared for every pixel so the graphics in some old (VGA) games look beautiful even now.
Another example – I bought myself Acer Aspire One netbook (Intel Atom 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD) and I feel uneasy about it. It’s too powerful for me and have too much of diskspace.