alt Hacker NewsWhat a cool piece of internet history. (And awesome that he was a good sport)
JGC, you seem to be one of those people that always has a finger in many little internet trivia things.
I'd be bold to say, almost like a Forrest Gump of the internet.
What a cool piece of internet history. (And awesome that he was a good sport)
JGC, you seem to be one of those people that always has a finger in many little internet trivia things.
I'd be bold to say, almost like a Forrest Gump of the internet.
I just have a high-degree of curiosity and a tendency to email random people and see if they'll respond. And I got on the Internet in 1986 so I've been around a while.
Fun story about that. Back in 1996 Nicholas Negroponte wrote a column in Wired lamenting the fact that laptop batteries didn't show their charge state. This mattered because all of us who travelled a lot carried multiple batteries to switch them in our laptops (some laptops could have two batteries at once allowing hot swapping without a shutdown). See: https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED4-12.html: "I now carry eight to ten battery packs during long trips. I won't even consider a laptop design that includes unstackable batteries. The fact that most batteries don't indicate their charge state is pathetic."
I emailed Negroponte with my solution: before a trip I'd charge all my batteries up (I think I had five) and I had numbered them by writing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on them with a sharpie. Then, I'd simply use them in numerical order. He graciously replied something along the lines of "Sometimes the best solution is the simplest".