It was also my first computer - sort of. An Acorn Electron anyway, which was basically a Micro for people without bottomless pockets. Fond memories of playing Elite and trying to learn BASIC! Sadly the Electron is long gone but I think I still have the novella that came with Elite knocking about somewhere. Started up an emulator a few years ago. First thing that came to mind was 'CHAIN'! It's weird how some things stick in your mind.

Similar experience! My department still has one connected up to one of our small radio telescopes used for teaching undergrads - they never replaced it because it never stopped working.

You could write a space trading adventure game complete with wireframe graphics in machine code. I'd consider that super-1337.

I've still yet to find a space trading game that is as fun as I remember Elite being on an Acorn electron. It was well worth the ridiculous loading times off the tape.

The JET tokamak has had a couple of huge flywheels to provide the power to its field coils since the early 1980s, and those are around 400MW peak output. True the pulse only lasts around half a minute or so, but it's still very impressive. Each flywheel has a moment of intertia of something around 14 million kgm^2. This may not even be that relevant to TFA but I thought it might be interesting.

...then, on my system, Mozilla has to go too.

14" 4:3 Thinkpad here. Amazing keyboard, and a proper 4:3 screen ratio. Sadly they're all widescreen now. The 15" 4:3 Flexviews were brilliant.

The period between system restarts?

Cheers! Yeah, a friend's T42 had one of those 1400x1050 14.1" screens - more modern laptop screens are pretty shocking in comparison.

I totally agree. I occasionally still use Thinkpads from 7-12 years ago (great keyboards, nice for writing and coding), and they all work (except a 380 that needed a new HDD and CMOS battery 2 years ago). They really were solid pieces of kit. I don't know about more recent Thinkpads however, as I've not owned a Lenovo. Are they still as reliable?

I still have one of those knocking about I think. Still works! I wish the same could be said for the mercury battery powered light meter on my Olympus rangefinder.

Is it a moon?

Of course tools die. They have to go to silicon heaven. Is it not written that the iron shall lie down with the lamp? If they didn't, where would all the calculators go?