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computers: 18 years of ThinkPads
Posted on 2021-06-28 by skierpage
(from my series "lovingly preparing old electronics for reuse, only for them to be dumped in a pile of E-waste")
ThinkPad 600E with BIOS error, ThinkPad T61 running Windows 10, ThinkPad T460 running Fedora KDE behind
IBM originally came up with the "ThinkPad" name for its pen-operated "slate" personal computer running the PenPoint operating system. That valiant attempt to replace clunky DOS/Windows with something better and familiar died, but the name stuck.
IBM ThinkPad laptops were known for the generally tough modular construction, the TrackPoint mouse nipple (the red dot between the 'G', 'H', and 'B' keys), and running all the connectors out so you would have full functionality from a docking station.
Mouse nipples!
The nipple still has its fans (I never learned all the things you could do with it and the three buttons below), but as humans have evolved to use their thumbs for typing and swiping, a touch-sensitive trackpad below the keyboard took over. You can see the T61 on the right added the touchpad and a second set of buttons below the Trackpoint buttons. I'm typing this on the 2016 T460 at the back, using an external mouse.
Docking maneuvers
IBM ran all the connecting wires for microphone, speakers, external display, serial port, parallel port, USB… everything to a connector under the laptop. Buy a docking station, connect all those to the docking station, then just drop the laptop in. You could also lock it to the docking station, making theft a lot more cumbersome. Nowadays almost every interface runs over USB so connection can be plugging in a single USB connector.
less modularity, no more docking connector
1998 ThinkPad 600E
The 1998 600E is festooned with connectors: modem, external floppy drive, infra-red (!). Its one USB connector is behind a door. It doesn't have built-in Ethernet (!), I had to plug in a big Xircom Ethernet adapter into its huge PCMCIA Card slot. Everything is modular and easily swappable, the hallmarks of an old-IBM design.
So modular, so swappable. PCMCIA Ethernet adapter, memory, CD-ROM drive, battery, hard drive
flappy bird cursor!
It powered on, but as you can see in the first photo it encounters errors during POST. They could be due to its CMOS battery dying, but it's just not worth tracking down. "POST" itself is a throwback, Power-On Self-Test. IBM's mind-set influenced the PC industry, and that was to test as much as possible every time you turn on your computer. I don't know whether today's laptops perform any self-test at startup. Note the cursor, it's a bird! As you move the cursor around, its wings flap up and down! Someone programmed that into its BIOS.
A 1998 laptop came with 64 Megabytes of RAM. That was a vast amount, 512 times more than my original Macintosh. But it's only 1/128 as much RAM as today's 8GB laptop.
2007 ThinkPad T61
This was after the sale of IBM's personal computer division to the Chinese computer maker Lenovo. I blogged about it when I ordered it. It's still got a full-on docking connector, which I actually used on my hulking Herman Levity "knowledge athlete" sit-stand workstation:
Need to re-connect mouse,keyboard, Ethernet, display, microphone, speakers?
Just dock it!
This booted up fine! So I removed all my user data and blanked out the admin user password so I can give it away.
Recovery partition hell
The T61 has a 160 GB hard drive, but only 110 GB was available!? I had put a 25 GB partition at the back in case I wanted to run Linux, but what happened to the other 20 GB or so?
Microsoft let manufacturers put a hidden recovery partition on computers, so if you had problems the manufacturer could restore to the original OEM build. But manufacturers don't add any value to Windows! They add a bloated manufacturer app that just calls out to Windows tools and Windows updates, and nags you to buy extended warranties and batteries, and in the case of Dell and HP the manufacturer installs nonsense third-party apps in exchange for $$$$ that slow your computer down. There was one of these OEM recovery partitions at the front of the drive, about 8 GB. However, if you ever use it, your computer is back to running the O.S. version at the time you bought it, despite years of updates. But Lenovo can continue to nag you to buy an extra battery!
Then, when I updated the laptop to Windows 10, Microsoft put its own hidden recovery partition, 560 MB, with a stripped-down Windows where you can attempt a reinstall and run a terminal.
I read up various instructions for how to copy the recovery partition and apply it elsewhere, requiring the typing of obscure command lines into Windows' terrible CMD.EXE terminal (and people complain Linux makes you use a terminal). I copied Microsoft's little recovery partition over the manufacturer's one (still wasting 7 GB), and extended the Windows partition to the end of the disk.
Update heck
There have been 4 half-yearly updates since I updated this laptop to Windows 10. Check for Updates reported them all, but instead of being able to update to the latest 21H1 update, Windows made me install 1909, then 2004 (dumb naming from Microsoft, this means 2020 April update, not a reversion to an earlier version of Windows), then 20H2 (second half of 2020), and finally 21H1. Each took hours of the disk whirring away at Preparing… Downloading… Installing, rebooting…, Installing… And for most of these Microsoft insisted on installing a separate .NET 4.0 update.
The other update craziness was the Lenovo Thinkvantage program required a 360 MB "Lenovo Foundation modules" software update… to sell bloody batteries.
Just give me an unrestricted up-to-date bootable Windows installer
All this work to extend the Windows partition and to update Windows is all completely stupid! I don't want or need any of my own information on the disk because I'm giving away the laptop. I should have been able to boot Windows off a USB flash drive, then wipe the laptop's hard drive and reinstall Windows on it. This is trivial with any Linux distribution; they're all free, they want you to download and run the latest and greatest (go and grab Fedora right now!). But you can't do this with Microsoft Windows. Even though I haven't paid for Windows in a decade and there are several ways to get it for free, Microsoft doesn't want anyone to be able to download Windows and run it anywhere on any PC, and wants to distinguish Windows 10 Home and "Pro." If I wipe the hard drive I lose my Windows authorization key and Microsoft can't be sure what version of Windows I had, so I have to carefully preserve a working Windows partition throughout, otherwise I have to phone Microsoft and prove I have a right to a Windows install. It's ridiculous. And then to let users with problems get back to a working laptop, Microsoft and OEMs have to dedicate a portion of the hard drive to these out-of-date obsolete stripped-down Window recovery partitions that I can run in an emergency. A 4 GB USB flash drive costs less than $2, just give me one of those with full Windows 10 on it, or let me make my own, and dedicate the entire disk to Windows!
Update: it turns out you can create your own installation media for Windows 10! I don't know why all the guides to moving around the recovery partition didn't tell you not to bother. But if you boot from this you get the limited "Windows Recovery Environment", not a full running copy of Windows, and you still have to somehow prove you've got a Windows Product Activation Key.
2016 T460
It's sleek and light. The main innovation is its SSD (solid state drive) that replaced all the whirring. We're so used to Windows starting quickly; it used to take a minute or way longer. The docking connector is gone; all peripherals bar an external display can connect over USB 3.0, so there's little point; if connecting Ethernet and mouse is too much hassle, buy a USB hub and plug them into that. (And with USB C, even displays can share the USB hub, and it can double as your power supply.)
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cars: Tesla Model S Plaid is a bargain at $131,000
Renz Dimaandal for Motor Trend
The Tesla Model S Plaid is crazy. Nitpicking fans are arguing over whether 0-60 in 2 seconds (!) is real because 1-foot rollout and special pavement blah blah, but Motor Trend managed to do it and found:
Faster projected quarter-mile than the LaFerrari ($1.4M)
"Its blistering 0-100-0-mph result was 8.2 seconds, besting the previous record holder, the McLaren Senna [also $1.4M], by 0.3 second."
"Ironically, the breathtaking straight-line achievements distract from another monumental achievement: The Model S Plaid is quite simply the best Tesla yet. It doesn't matter if you're cruising down the highway, slogging through city traffic, or slicing down your favorite back road. The Model S Plaid delivers, no matter what you ask it to do. On the highway and around town, the 2022 Tesla Model S Plaid is comfortable, quiet, and a delightful place to pass the miles."
That combination is insane. Thousands of people who can afford a $1,000,000 supercar are going to buy a 5-seat, practical, better tech Plaid instead, or at least in addition. Tens of thousands of people who can afford a $150,000 sports car or performance sedan are going to buy a Plaid. Supercar-collecting YouTuber Manny Khoshbin, who has five white Rolls Royces at home for day-to-day driving in addition to his exotic collection, accidentally ordered a second Plaid and kept the order. Why not, it's cheaper than the custom luggage for his specially-customized Hermes edition "1 of 1" McLaren Speedtail. This is how the combustion age ends, from the top down (and from electric bicycles up).
Counterfactual world
I also notice from comments how so many people are deep into the illusion that the counterfactual " 'd ", as in "I'd still get the Taycan/Nevera" or "I would never get one because of the funny steering yoke", has real-world significance. When I was a kid I would participate: "I'd buy the Countach in gold over the Testarossa." Now I actually have that kind of money, I spent it on a kitchen remodel 🤷🏻.
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cars: genuine excellence vs. milking the ultra-rich
zOMG, the 25th McLaren F1 built with only 242 miles on the clock, including the luggage, the watch, the magnesium toolkit, …
Photo by Mike Maez, © Gooding & Company
Moooo…
Back in 1995 McLaren built a jaw-dropping advance on any production car and most race cars for "only" $1M, and struggled to sell 106 of them over 9 years. Now McLaren, Aston Martin, Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and obscure marques all routinely announce "limited" editions of so-called hypercars you've never heard of, with worse performance for MORE MONEY, and all 200+ cars sell out before production even starts. The increased wealth of the ultra-rich over 25 years is astounding, and an entire section of the car industry has cynically evolved to extract money from them like milking cows . Tax wealth!
Classic is another word for old and out-of-date
Most cars depreciate, but there are still dozens of vintage car models worth many times more their original cost. This McLaren F1 with its gold foil in the engine compartment, central driving position, bespoke V-12 engine, and 241 mph top speed is almost priceless (this example will probably auction for over $15,000,000). But in general there's objectively nothing that makes an old sports car with less tech and performance than a $100,000 Tesla Model S worth six figures. For now there are ever-increasing numbers of crazy rich people with money to burn who want to own the sports cars they lusted over in their youth. As multi-millionaires age out and newer ones lose interest in combustion engines, I'm not sure how long the million-dollar vintage car party will continue. Fans gush over the visceral thrill of a thundering V-12 engine or screaming V-10, but noise is no longer a signifier of performance, any more than the smell of a thoroughbred horse is.
Even the coffee-table McLaren F1 book now costs 4 figures. What I really want is a reproduction of the black & white Ralph Lauren Purple Label ad that's a closeup of his two F1s parked side-by-side.
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software: I can't share what I see
I've now found two visuals that utterly defeat Google's Android Camera AI: dim saturated orange sky at midday due to particulates high in the atmosphere from distant fires, and a lunar eclipse. Right now the Super Blood Flower Lunar Eclipse Chevrolet Moon is a beautiful thin crescent of white on the rim of a very dark slightly orange disc, but not according to Google , it knows the Moon is an off-white orb. I can't get a picture of what I see!
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books: good non-fiction
Some non-fiction books that I read on paper. I sometimes wish this stuff was more interactive, even beyond a Kindle. I want to read words (15-minute YouTube videos entertain more than instruct!) and have easier access to the particular things referenced. Maybe people will read physical books wearing Google Glass spectacles.
Compelling argument to give Nick Bostrom's institute money to study the dangers of AGI
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
★★★★☆ Dry yet readable explanation how we can't understand or control an intelligence greater than ours, so we must figure out how to instill goals in it that are good for humankind (i.e. "donate to my Future of Humanity Institute"). The problem is real if far-off, and it looks like the first Artificial General Intelligence will have the goals of a sociopathic billionaire like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Engaging travelogue and history guide to San Francisco
Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco by Gary Kamiya
★★★☆☆ A clever way to present interesting details about the history, natural history, and built form of the city. It's not a guidebook but it makes you want to visit the locations.
Unfocused rumination on alien-ness
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
★★★☆☆ Interesting sensitive description of octopi and how different they are, but it doesn't attempt to answer the hard questions about the nature of mind.
Weak book about an excellent project
The Vinyl Frontier: The story of the Voyager golden record by Jonathan Scott
★★☆☆☆ The design, production, and curation of the audiovisual album stuck on the side of the Voyager probes is interesting, but this book quotes so heavily from the existing book written by Carl Sagan and other the participants ("Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record) that I wonder how much it adds. It feels like an extended magazine article, and it turns out the author writes for Record Collector Magazine. Also, it has five typos!
Intriguing mad scientist designs
The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes by David E. H. Jones
★★★☆☆ Collection of the quasi-scientific imaginary inventions presented in New Scientist in the 1970s. Some are dated, but they still make you think.
How did I do this?
This blog post has bits of JSON-LD describing my book review that in theory tell search engines what I'm explaining; a script generates them along with the visible templated HTML that I paste into WordPress. The post "book reviews yet again" has the gory details.
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design: buttons barred, suit yourself
When I had Perry's of Bangkok tailor a suit for me (in a very different time and place!), I knew I didn't want that anachronistic row of buttons on the jacket sleeves. They used to work: I had a science teacher who would unbutton all 6 before rolling up his jacket sleeves, and the legendary suit that I found on the street when I was a roadsweeper (which deserves its own blog post) also had working buttons. But on nearly all suits today they don't do anything beyond cheaply echoing the pips on military jackets that denote rank (read interesting details of "surgeon's cuffs").
The name is 'P'. 'SP'.
So instead I specified crisp equally non-functional gold bars in place of those buttons, and had Rama Jewelry in Thailand fabricate them with the simplest iteration of the 'SP' logo design by my imaginary company Slerge Design Industries (also deserving of a blog post). I also had Rama make some 'SP' cufflinks. I liked octagons at the time; Rama designed the cufflinks a little flashier than I envisioned but overall they came out really nice.
For the full brushed metal with gold accents design suite, I had a Seiko analog watch with high-tech display (it's hard to believe that tiny monochrome strip was the biggest LCD screen anyone could fabricate), and a Montblanc Noblesse fountain pen (so much nicer than the groß Meisterstück fountain pen that later became popular). I also bought a knock-off of the Cartier Santos Decor lighter, then realized a) cigars taste awful, and b) I don't want to light anyone's cigarette.
(Thanks to Fred for modeling.)
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computers: bye to desktop
I realized I hadn't powered on my old desktop PC for years. It's an HP Pavilion I bought second-hand for $100 a decade ago, which had more features than my custom-built $3000 Falcon Northwest aluminum behemoth from 2004. I upgraded it to 2GB of RAM and replaced its power supply when the mythic "hairdryer trick" stopped working.
It's a relic from a different era. Although its motherboard has built-in Ethernet, it has a separate not especially powerful ATI graphics card because AMD and Intel hadn't integrated graphics with the CPU of desktop PCs yet. It even has a fax/modem card to send and receive faxes with Windows Fax and Scan. And look at all the front-panel slots for obsolete flash memory cards, let alone the serial and parallel and PS/2 and mouse and whatever connectors the cards have on the back.
When I bought the HP Pavilion I slotted in my hard drive from the behemoth Falcon and plugged it into the wiring harness, and I could boot my existing Linux Kubuntu 9.10 and access all my existing files. Windows XP didn't survive the transition, but the HP came with Windows Vista.
I kept it around to receive faxes, or in case I needed to run old software, or burn one CD to another, or needed to read a CompactFlash memory card, or got a Firewire device, or needed a parallel port or RS-232 serial connection (like syncing my Palm Pilot and Samsung Palmphones). … The likelihood of any of those happening is zero. It would be less hassle to buy a new USB peripheral, like the external Pioneer Blu-ray/DVD/CD/CD-ROM drive I bought to "rip" a music CD on my laptop for the first time in years.
I booted it up and it ran Kubuntu 9.10 and Windows Vista fine, but you forget how sluggish and noisy a PC with a spinning hard drive was.
Program installs and Windows Updates sucked in Windows Vista
I also forgot the hassles of installing programs and Windows Updates under Windows Vista. Each uninstall of Quicken and several years of TurboTax 20NN (the latter is pretty much the only Windows program I use outside of games that doesn't have a free open source alternative that runs under Linux) took literally 10 minutes of thinking, mostly not even accessing the hard drive. I checked TaskMgr.exe and AVG anti-virus free edition was using up 30% of CPU; uninstalling that and rebooting sped up the rest of the program uninstalls to only take 7 minutes each. It was a great day when Microsoft integrated anti-virus into Windows!
Then I made the mistake of running "Windows Update" which failed with a classic error code 80072efe. I forgot that I had given up on Windows Update; it simply stopped working, grinding away at "checking for updates" for literally hours. There were thousands of struggling Windows Vista users reinstalling executables, running System File Checker, disabling and enabling internal Windows Services like BITS, Cryptographic, and MSI Installer. Back then I wound up downloading patches one-by-one and manually installing them. I had managed to update the machine to Vista Service Pack 2, and it turns out Microsoft never released another service pack for Vista.
Windows Defender wouldn't update either and Vista was freaking out because with AVG banished I had no antivirus, so I tried installing the recommended Microsoft Security Essentials. However, Microsoft's download web site is incompatible with Vista's Internet Explorer, which displays a blank window instead of a [Download 32-bit version] button. I had already uninstalled Firefox, d'oh! So I visited the site in Firefox on my laptop, copied the static URL of the download, and put it in a gist on GitHub, only to find that Internet Explorer can't display GitHub pages either ! Retro computing is not much fun.
Off to a new home the landfill
Anyway, after uninstalling these programs, deleting my Documents, Games, Pictures, Music, Videos and also the obscure application files in AppData\{Local,LocalLow,Roaming}, uninstalling all these programs, and changing the default user to "admin" with no password, I took it to Goodwill… who had a giant cardboard box for both electric and electronics donations where it was probably crushed by someone dumping a microwave on top of it. I doubt it will ever be powered on again.
Bonus: PC-TV integration was The Future in 2004
The only thing my big Falcon Northwest behemoth did differently than this desktop or any laptop since was its ATI All-in-Wonder 9800 graphics card. It could display, record, and output TV signals! To do this it came with dozens of connecting cables and breakout boxes for R,G,B,audio left, audio right,composite,component, and once set up it had a multimedia remote to drive the whole thing. "The ALL-IN-WONDER family of cards are powerful TV tuners, DVD players, Personal Video Recorders, and 2D & 3D graphics and video accelerators." Wow! This was quite cutting-edge in 2004. I set it up in one corner of the living room (I ordered a quieter PC case with lots of sound insulation) and ran an S-Video cable to our TV. I was able to tune in and watch broadcast TV on it, display PC windows on our TV, and even recorded the Winter Olympics and a few other shows to hard drive. This seemed like the future, but it never gelled. It was too awkward to switch back and forth from running the TV to operating the PC. The remote had dozens of buttons to drive ATI's multimedia programs but I still wound up needing to use a keyboard. Decades later this hasn't changed. I think the only people who unify their TV and PC experience are college students who only have one screen.
I still have a bunch of proprietary .vcr video files that I recorded with the All-In-Wonder card, that even the great VLC media player can't play… Damn! I should have installed ATI's MultiMedia Center software to the old desktop PC to try to convert them to something more useful.
music: digitization and the Internet changed music, the Web didn't
Videos-about-music maker Rick Beato made a stimulating video of "TOP 20 Inventions that CHANGED Music." It's entertaining and a pretty good list.
Digitization!
He left out the underlying technique of digitization. Without it, inventions he mentioned like CDs, PC music, Napster, and digital audio workstations, would all be impossible. Our computer devices would only be playing MIDI files – the bleeps and blurps of the soundtrack of the first DOOM videogame and early Nokia ringtones. Wikipedia says the technique of Pulse Code Modulation was invented in 1937! Then we had to wait decades for storage to become cheap and fast enough, and for Analog-to-Digital Converters (and their inverse, DACs) to increase in bit rate and decrease in cost, before digitized sound expanded from AT&T compressing voice calls for long-distance transmission to a storage format for music.
The Internet affected music, not the Web
Some people argued the list should have included the Web, because it made the Internet usable. I said no:
The web didn't change music the way these other inventions did. Napster and P2P sharing like Bittorrent don't use HTML or HTTP, they're different protocols on the Internet. Before them people traded music files over other Internet protocols like USENET news groups and FTP file servers, and buying songs with the iTunes program came before widespread downloading of them from web stores. Sir Tim is my hero for solving hyperlinked presentation of remote information, but not for affecting music.
I would love it if the web had changed music more! Imagine if early multimedia CD-ROMs had successfully migrated to the web. You'd go to the artist's web site for a new release or to a music fan like Rick Beato's web site for a presentation of 20 great bass lines, and the pictures and text and video about the music would be integrated with a music player that plays the relevant songs (and ensures the musicians get paid). Instead all you get an audio file with the track name and an album thumbnail 🙁, or you watch a linear video. You don't even get bloody liner notes until someone separately puts them on the web in a video description or Discogs entry.
Music as a computer file blew my fragile little mind.
Returning to digitization, turning music into files and then streams was an evolutionary process. I worked at a company that made multimedia chips (back in the days when you needed an add-on card to play PC games on Windows 3.0 and Windows 95), and we bought a $3,000 industrial CD player and installed special Windows drivers to access the 1s and 0s on a CD to turn a Pink Floyd album track into a Windows .WAV file. It was a bit-perfect copy of the song from the CD, perhaps one of the earliest to exist outside of a recording studio and years before "ripping a CD" became commonplace. It took up 1/5 of a hard drive! (Which is why games like DOOM used MIDI files for soundtracks, and sound files were only for short sound effects.) I knew turning a song into a computer file "PF_SORRO.WAV" was insanely significant and was going to change music, but I wasn't sure how.
While writing this I learned that CDs (first prototyped in 1979) predated the first digitally recorded album, supposedly Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop (1983). Again, storage was key. I think the music on early CDs were transferred from the analog masters to digital audio tapes or digital signals on videotape (!), and the CD stampers were burned from these. It was years before each track in a recording could be stored on a hard drive. Steely Dan's great engineer Roger Nichols has interesting recollections of the early years of digital recording.
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playing Pong with your mind vs. William Gibson
Ars Technica has an appropriately level-headed article about Elon Musk's Neuralink company getting a monkey to play Pong with its mind, which reminds people of William Gibson:
the old Cyberpunk fan in me dreams of cyberdecks: devices without screens or without keyboards. You could have one implant in visual cortex and/or one in motor cortex and then connect wireless via Bluetooth. The latter part sounds ridiculous, but with this implant, we could build a device qualifying as a cyberdeck today.
– asnelt
Their misperception of his presentation of cyberspace lets me step in with exegesis of the master…
William Gibson was suitably vague about "jacking in" to the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, but the Ono-Sendai models definitely have keyboards. "distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face "; "the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers flying across the board." And Gibson went with electrodes, not wireless. "He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were basically the same."
The whole panoply of interfaces Gibson presented in the sprawl series (Johnny Mnemonic–Burning Chrome–Neuromancer–Count Zero–Mona Lisa Overdrive) is vague on inputs. He describes holoporn, Simstim, cyberspace, telepresence primarily by their outputs, not how you manipulate them.
Gibson's other huge invention, microsoft, is also a brain-machine interface, also defiantly un-wireless. The silicon slivers of microsoft you slot into a carbon socket behind your ear give you knowledge of a language or kung fu or whatever (or in the exceptional case of biosoft, someone's recollections and emotions 😍). "the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable"; "an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket." No web lookups required, hella cooler than playing Pong.
However, the same socket is clearly capable of controlling a machine.
And then he was in the cockpit, breathing the new-car smell of long-chain monomers, the familiar scent of newly minted technology, and the girl was behind him, an awkward doll sprawled in the embrace of the g-web that Conroy had paid a San Diego arms dealer to install behind the pilot's web. The plane was quivering, a live thing, and as he squirmed deeper into his own web, he fumbled for the interface cable, found it, ripped the microsoft from his socket, and slid the cable-jack home.
Knowledge lit him like an arcade game, and he surged forward with the plane-ness of the jet, feeling the flexible airframe reshape itself for jump-off as the canopy whined smoothly down on its servos. The g-web ballooned around him, locking his limbs rigid, the gun still in his hand. "Go, motherfucker." But the jet already knew, and g-force crushed him down into the dark.
The writing in Count Zero is soooo good.
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books: William Gibson flashes of excellence
Early William Gibson is so white-hot, not just the fantastic Sprawl series (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) but also his short stories, adaptations, and explorations. My 30-year-old web page captures all his output back then, including the rarities.
It's unrealistic to expect that level of achievement throughout a career, and his subsequent trilogies are pleasant nearer futures with drily comic observations, a lot of cultural and branding references, engaging characters, and not a lot of plot.
He's picked up steam in the 2010s…
Distrust That Particular Flavor
Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson ISBN 978-0-425-25299-4
★★★☆☆ Short non-fiction essay collection is essential for "Down the Line," his sensational reverie on moving pictures from cave paintings in flickering firelight to a kid playing VR kung fu with classic movie characters.
Elegiac projected future sadness
The Peripheral by William Gibson ISBN 978-0 -399-15844-5
★★★★☆ The usual late Gibson: really short chapters intercutting, straightforward weak plot, the characters include a hollow man and a plucky young woman, it leads to a high-tech shootout. Add the tired Macguffin of time travel and my expectations were low. But the time travel has a clever twist, so that the intercutting is between here and now and a far future that's post-post-apocalyptic; the rural dead-end and war veteran kids are fantastically well portrayed; the future has a bizarre trash cult. It's the best late Gibson, and I enjoyed re-reading it.
Hilary Clinton lost
Agency by William Gibson ISBN 978-1-101-98693-6
★★★☆☆ Gibson returns to the setup from The Peripheral. In interviews he talked about how Trump's presidency threw his plans for the book into disarray, so he adds an alternate history to the time travel Macguffin which comes across self-indulgent. It's nowhere near as strong as The Peripheral, continuing its themes but shifting the present-day thread from rural hurt to the same urban flâneur vibe as his previous trilogy e.g. Zero History.
This blog post has bits of JSON-LD describing my book review that in theory tell search engines what I'm explaining. The post "book reviews yet again" has the gory details.
music: this Bach guy is seriously good
excess: own something owned by someone famous, for crazy money
The rise and fall of Ovation
eco: YouTuber hypes Plasma Kinetics hydrogen nonsense
eco: let me de-junk my order!
Dale on eco: the big lie of recycling triangles
skierpage on eco: the big lie of recycling triangles
skierpage on music: Trevor Horn gigantism
skierpage on Nikola Motors and its hydrogen truck story
skierpage on skiing: rockers forever
disintermediation