I've been using an iPad (2048x1536) with AirDisplay. It works just fine for your scenario. The frame rate is dependant on the connection speed, so it's not suitable for games and video, but there are other solutions for that.

Actually you could push 4k resolutions out of really old video cards, including something like HDMI 1.0 and single-link DVI. You'd just have to scale down the refresh rate. The video card limits are mostly a function of bandwidth and they don't really care about the display geometry, all they do is send a stream of bytes from their frame buffer along with some sync bits to tell the monitor where the line or frame ends.

30Hz is fine for a monitor, when you do productivity. It's even fine for most video. The most common issue I have with it is losing the mouse cursor sometimes, because motion tracking of such fast-moving items is where a faster frame rate would be useful.

I actually run mine at 34Hz :P It's more of a function of how much over the specs your display adapter can supply bandwidth.
It's also awesome for civilization-like strategy games, where you want to see as much of the map at once as possible. If I wanted bigger refreshes out of it, I could perform the almost-60Hz (56Hz-ish seems to be stable for most) mod on it by overclocking its fpga's. That'd mean driving it with four single-link dvi heads, each at 1920x1200.

I've had a 22" 3840x2400 IPS monitor for years in daily use. Still waiting for "modern technology" to catch up.

Back from the future, eh? cso93veo in legacy datetime is 33747-01-13 14:40:00 UTC assuming no new leap stuff was invented since mnd8qv.

I'd suggest just base36-formatting the epoch (unix) time. It's about mnbzcn when I'm writing this.

km/ms would be kilometers per millisecond.

Only in theory. In practice, it's going to be better performance with an external GPU than most mobile GPU's.

No, that'd be mebiyear. You shouldn't use kilo, mega, giga, tera etc for 2^10 -based things either.

Model M with its buckling springs is technically a membrane keyboard too. It just has a metal spring and plastic counterweight instead of a rubber membrane as on the cheapo keyboards. I'd say it's as mechanical as the scissor mechanism on laptops.

Maybe you quit them a bit too early? I've also had laptops roughly the same time you've had, but they were basically peripherials to my desktop machines, never a replacements like they became recently.

Sure, I had a Mac Pro in daily use before I upgraded to the retina mbp. It was absolutely necessary for driving enough displays and a (then) huge amount of 16GB ram and fast enough CPU's. However, I see it as a thing of the past in my case. Technology caught up and provides what I need in a laptop form-factor for the first time ever. Within a few years, the same will happen to most of the remaining workstation users.

Umm what? I can connect three separate screens directly into my (retina) macbook pro (2x displayport + 1x dvi). More with external thunderbolt PCIe breakout chassis' using more GPU's. One of the external screens I have connected has a resolution of 3840x2400, which is about as big as it gets resolution-wise.

Retina MBP's and iMacs have two thunderbolt ports. The rest of the lineup will probably follow soon.