Newsday, Melville, N.Y., Lou Dolinar column.

Publication: Newsday (Melville, New York) (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News)

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Newsday

Byline: Lou Dolinar

Mar. 5--Way back in 1981, I bought my first computer, an Osborne I "portable" that tipped the scales at 26.2 pounds and had a 3.5-inch-wide monitor, a 4-megahertz processor, and in the absence of a hard drive, a pair of 5 1/4-inch removable floppy drives.

The Sony Vaio laptop I use today is thousands of times more powerful in most measurable ways. But the old Osborne could do one thing that, until quite recently, all the fancy new PCs couldn't match: It ran programs from the removable drives, no fuss, no muss. Anytime it overheated, which it did with some frequency, I could pop out the disk containing my custom configured Wordstar word-processing program, borrow another Osborne, and usually finish up the story I was working on. I never "installed" software -- I just stuck in a disk and ran it.

I forget exactly when that sort of scenario became impossible -- probably around the time Windows 1.0 showed up. Programs got bloated fast, and the...

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