Around 12 years ago I had four Atari Portfolio palmtop computers complete with boxes, manuals and a ton of memory cards plus many accessories. For some really stupid reason I decided that they were a pieces of crap and chucked them (I faintly remember trying to sell them on ebay without success) but not before smashing them up for fun.
Well I came across that website I made all those years ago and thought I’d check what they are worth now. Well two sold for over £300 so I really should have kept them as I could have made about a grand out of them. I’ve been clearing out a lot of ‘junk’ recently and it makes me wonder if I should keep it. Who knows what it will be worth in 10 years time?
That’s probably why people hoard things. But I really should not have destroyed those Atari Portfolios…. Here’s some before and after pictures which were taken on a equally 12 year old crappy digital camera.
Ah, it reminds me of the message you get when smashing up a wand of wishing in UnNetHack: “You really wish you hadn’t done that.” 🙂
I still have my old HP620LX in near-mint condition – and it even continues to work perfectly fine, after replacing the ancient Li-Ion 18650 cells in the battery pack.
It’s also quite amazing, in that “shutdown” really means “standby” – it only takes about a second from pressing the power button, to being fully ready to use; and turns off just as quickly 🙂
Even from a hard restart, it reboots in only ~20-30s; quite impressive.
Unfortunately, it has pretty much long since outlived its usefulness – for starters, it only accepts 16-bit PCMCIA cards (as opposed to the far more common 32-bit cards), and the web browser is ancient and can’t be updated.
Also the CPU is quite slow, even for its time, and it does show – even with just the included software.
Sadly, no one is developing any software for Win CE2.0 anymore, and it’s been that way for the last decade or so already. To speak nothing of PCMCIA device drivers.
So it stopped being useful for accessing the Internet over a decade ago… 🙁
Still, I’m keeping it primarily for sentimental reasons, and even then only because I have the space to spare.