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Life is full of metaphors. Especially in the modern age, we've built layers upon layers of abstraction to seperate us from the realities of the world. This is readily evident in computers, build with the metaphor of a "desktop" in mind to ease everyday people into accepting them into their lives.

Personal computing has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last forty years but that metaphor still abstracts everything going on beneath the surface. I was really into Macs for awhile and still have a modern Windows 10 based laptop mostly used for gaming, but when I was building this site I dug my old Thinkpad out of storage.

This model, the X220, is about ten years old now- ancient in PC terms, but still very capable with the right knowhow. One of the amazing thing about this is the keyboard and its two rows of function keys and clicky, almost mechanical feeling typing experience. Unfortunately future Thinkpad models would move towards the now near universal chiclet, island style of keys.

Another great thing about these older models is the upgrade and repair potential. Practically everything on this laptop can be fixed with a single, regular phillips screwdriver. There's even some advanced mods that let you install highres LCD panels. For me, so far I've just upgraded the RAM and replaced the hard drive with a much faster SSD. Oh, and I have the 9 cell extended battery, and an additional "slice" battery that attaches under the laptop for supplemental power.

Ah, which reminds me of the battery life- up to 15 hours(!), depending on what I'm doing, which is almost unheard of even today, outside of ultraportable power sipping type devices.

A lot of the power and versatility of this machine comes from its operating system: When it comes to old Thinkpads, I only run Linux on them. Specifically usually an Arch variant, as I've found it to be the most customizable for my needs. With Linux I'm encouraged to play around on the command line. Bypassing the desktop illusion while interacting directly with the machine helps me understand what's going on under the hood, even if I am by no means an expert.

Hence the Complicated Simplicity- it's just you and a blinking command prompt, but mastering it can take years.

And doing it all on an old Thinkpad just feels cool :D

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