I did back in college. Mobile computing was just becoming a thing but I was way too hipster (and poor) for a PDA or one of those newfangled “smart phone” devices.
I hacked together a wifi SMS texting gadget following a tutorial on Hack a Day. It ran Debian with Linux kernel 2.6 and was so fun to tinker with.
It had 32 MB of RAM but X used 11 MB of that so you couldn’t really do anything in graphical mode anyway. A shell running GNU screen however only took 4 MB so it was much more usable from the terminal.
I eventually figured out a way to pipe images and even (non accelerated, since it didn’t have a GPU) video from mplayer to write directly into the framebuffer. It was a real bear to get it translated into landscape mode.
I Am Legend in 144p never looked so good.
Even with the terrible specs, I have never loved a phone so much as I loved that little computer
you gotta be atleast twice my age, that entire string of sentences is absurd to me. No GPU? Original I am legend in 144p; absolute hell, why even live. RAM measured in mb?!?!? Wild
In college when smartphones were new had to be before 2010 and to be in college you are usually 18 ish atleast so at minimum 11 years older than me and I’m 20. Double was certainly generous but I’m drunk so it is what it is.
Out of curiosity what distro do you use these days?
I did back in college. Mobile computing was just becoming a thing but I was way too hipster (and poor) for a PDA or one of those newfangled “smart phone” devices.
I hacked together a wifi SMS texting gadget following a tutorial on Hack a Day. It ran Debian with Linux kernel 2.6 and was so fun to tinker with.
It had 32 MB of RAM but X used 11 MB of that so you couldn’t really do anything in graphical mode anyway. A shell running GNU screen however only took 4 MB so it was much more usable from the terminal.
I eventually figured out a way to pipe images and even (non accelerated, since it didn’t have a GPU) video from mplayer to write directly into the framebuffer. It was a real bear to get it translated into landscape mode.
I Am Legend in 144p never looked so good.
Even with the terrible specs, I have never loved a phone so much as I loved that little computer
you gotta be atleast twice my age, that entire string of sentences is absurd to me. No GPU? Original I am legend in 144p; absolute hell, why even live. RAM measured in mb?!?!? Wild
Sounds impressive though atleast
Not unless you’re really young. I was just a Linux enthusiast and had a tight budget. I think this is the original article that inspired me: https://hackaday.com/2009/09/25/with-zipit-who-needs-a-netbook/
In college when smartphones were new had to be before 2010 and to be in college you are usually 18 ish atleast so at minimum 11 years older than me and I’m 20. Double was certainly generous but I’m drunk so it is what it is.
Out of curiosity what distro do you use these days?
Haha, well you got me there. I did all that when I was your age, in 2009 :P
These days I don’t use my personal computer very often so I want a distro that doesn’t break when I update it, so I use Debian Stable with XFCE.
I’m not sure what that makes it in terms of OP’s meme. Maybe XFCE is the car
My first computer had 4KB of RAM.
Damn, and I thought my IBM 5150 with its 512KB of RAM was light.
Wild my first (and current) PC has roughly 32gb