I was a law student in 91-93, and I had one of these to take notes in class. In every class, I was the only person with a laptop. I used only the word processor, then at night dumped the notes via printing to serial cable to capture them in my 512k 'fat' mac back at home. It was great. It lasted for days, and did everything that I needed. The battery lasted forever. Looking back, it's funny the comments I would get - 'are you cheating?' 'is that allowed?'

A few people that I knew were simultaneously playing with other 'laptops' - Zeniths with the mini-disc, etc. I had much more success than any of them.

Yes, and Adobe Photoshop could be modified to become a program that indoctrinates me in Marxist philosophy. What's the point? That a user installing an application needs to trust its source? This has been true ever since there has been third party software.

Shame on Slashdot for pushing this.

While the application development environment was locked, it made sense to play this cat-and-mouse game of jailbreaking phones to get at 3rd part apps. Now that Apple has created a rich ecosystem of free and fairly priced applications, I've lost all interest in the process. I happily scrubbed my phone and went with a clean build of 1.2.

Of course, there are a different set of motivations behind carrier unlocking.