During the cleaning of my home office I came across an old notebook from a few years back, full of notes about the configuration of my PCs.

In it I find things like this:

Linux Kernel Config
2.0.36
Loadable Modules Support
 [*] Enable loadable module support

Network device support
 [*] Ether express pro 100 (mice)
 [*] NE2000 support (rats)

/dev/cdrom => /dev/scd0

Most interesting to me is the mention of mice.my.flat and rats.my.flat - fun hostnames! A quick google suggests that 2.0.36 was current sometime in early January 1999

I remember buying a network card, at that time, meant going to the local computer shop, and picking two cards at random from their "network card bin". Each card cost £5 and my approach was to go in and buy two cards at random, then get home and modprobe every module until I found one of them at least. If there was no joy I'd return the next weekend and exchange them for two more!

Funny how things change.

Nowadays on my primary machine, vain.my.flat, I have autodetection of my current (onboard) NIC. I don't have to worry about ports or iobase for my (onboard) sound.

Everything just works... (Except for the GNOME-panel volume control applet which crashes on startup. Hmmm.)

Same local domain name, different flat.

Tags: mice.my.flat, nostalgia, rats.my.flat | No comments