What's your journey to the Framework 16?

Framework Laptop 16
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Damn, some of you guys (hopefully there are some ladies here also?) Make me feel young, and others old… :grin:

My first was a 286 clone at 15Mhz, 640k, monochrome (gold), 5.25floppy and a 20Mb 5.25" MFM drive ( the drive is still sitting on the shelf above my computer desk with the cover off and gold platters gleaming!)
First upgrade was to remove 8 individual ram ICs from the motherboard and replace them with 12 new ones to upgrade from 640k to a WHOLE MEGABYTE! only to realize that the extra memory had little practical use in DOS 3.1 or thereabouts… :face_with_head_bandage:
386s,486s, Pentiums, Windoze, freeBSD, redhat, raid servers… All for fun. :sunglasses:

Played Estarian Conquest with friends on a local BBS, trafficked in bootleg software that I harvested from Usenet and ran a Warez server(freeBSD) with My first multiple gigabyte (13Gb!) hard drive.

The last whole computer build I did was 25 years ago for my 40th birthday the same week that the first bootleg copy of Windows 7 hit the internet. And it still runs if I power it up.

Most fun thing in my “blown parts collection" is My first 386 (40mhz?) Motherboard that got handed down to my wife who used it for her medical transcription business (a $5 PC running word perfect over DOS, connected to a $700 Lazer printer😁) for years until she reported boot failure and I found that the 4 AA battery pack (stuck to the side of the power supply and forgotten) that used to power the RTC on my original 286 motherboard had leaked battery acid directly into a memory slot… it produced some trippy effects in POST graphics before it hung completely.

All this to say that I have spent my life trying to re-use, recycle and reduce waste wherever practical. I did eventually stop building PCs for myself and others due to economic factors and the convenience of laptops. The laptops were always repaired/refurbished hand-me-downs though. Linux allows them to work well past their projected lifespans…

Bringing it to present day, the Asus i5 laptop that I bought for my son for his HS graduation became mine again after he upgraded a few years later. It was 13+ years old when the power port burned out and smoked part of the motherboard last month, the same week that I first heard about Framework in a Louis Rossman video…
So now I have a batch 16 preorder which will be the most money I have spent on a computer for myself in 25 years. Quite possibly more than the total that I have spent on computers in that time. But I am absolutely thrilled to support this project! This laptop will be so much more than I need but may be the last one I ever need.

I am actually grateful that I did not find out about framework a few years ago because I would have felt compelled to buy a 13-in laptop. I have never had a laptop smaller than 15 in that I liked. So it is fortuitous that the confluence of a dead laptop and a random YouTube find have brought me to this point.

If anyone has read this far, thank you for listening and please help support this project!

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hi hi eso here, not a guy. :grin:

i didn’t give my whole history in my earlier bit, focusing on the more immediate stuff, but my initial computing goes all the way back to the color computer 2, the apple 2 series, then to 386 an plus.

i remember the ems/xms pain very well. (also the voodoo memory manager! thanks origin! we remember you fondly as you were, and not the exploited zombie ea turned you into!)

i’m pretty sad that most of my oldest stuff all got lost years ago. all i have now in my junk pile is mostly obsolete-but-modern stuff, and thus not terribly interesting.

yeah. i’m really into this, now that i’ve found it. waiting for batch 15 is proving super painful, since as i mentioned above, i am still on a mid-2012 macbook pro as a temporary unit. (i am currently trying to get linux on it because i’m tired of macos, tho)

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Here’s an alternate take to the answer… I hope it amuses.

Teletype Printer to IBM 370 mainframe, BBC Micro, Commodore 16, Amstrad PPC 640. IBM 3270 terminal, IBM PS/2, IBM PS/1, Various Toshiba Satellites (several B/W, LCD & Orange Gas plasma ), Toshiba Color Laptop, Dell laptop I think here, Apple iMac G4, Apple 17" MacBookPro PPC, MacBook (white), MacBook 2009, iMac 2012, MacBookpro 2012, Mac Mini’s 2010 - 2012, Custom X99 PC With Nvidia GTX 980 SE, MacBook Pro 15" (Intel), MacBook Pro 2019 16" i9 (fully loaded), Raspberry PI Turing pi 2 cluster, Custom Ryzen 7950x3D + NVidia 4090, FW 16 (Ryzen 9 + 7700)

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Reading through this thread does bring back some memories… I started WAY back there. In 1981 (I was eleven) my aunt, who lived across the street from us at the time, got a TI-99/4a just as TI was getting out of the home-computer market. She had typed in a slot-machine program (in BASIC!) from the manual, and it wasn’t working, so she asked me to come over and see if I could find the problem. I did, a misplaced comma if I recall correctly, and I was hooked – from that point on, I wanted to be a software developer.

Got my own TI-99/4a for my twelfth birthday, when one of my mother’s co-workers sold his used one to her for $100. It had a handful of game cartridges and a speech synthesizer with it, and I spent that entire summer writing programs in BASIC for it. They quickly outgrew the 16K (!!) of memory that it had, so I soon upgraded to a Sinclair QL. 128K, and as horrible as the “floppy tape” drives on it were, they were orders of magnitude better than the cassette tapes that I had to store my TI programs on. Had to keep a small fan blowing onto the right side of it to keep one particular part from overheating and locking up the system all the time, but other than that, it was awesome for the time.

Moved from that to my first PC, a Tandy 8088 laptop around 1989. 40(?)-line grayscale LCD screen, and two 3.5" floppy drives! RICHES! :smiley: Sold that later so I could build my first desktop PC, which I think was a '286.

I long ago lost count of the many permutations my desktop went through. '386, '486, various Pentiums, etctera. Went from DOS to multitasking DOS via DESQview/QEMM386, then to OS/2 because it multitasked DOS better. Skipped Windows 3.x, it would have been a significant step backwards, but got an early version of Windows 95 with the first laptop I’d bought since that Tandy one… came on a huge bunch of 3.5" floppies, because CD-ROMs weren’t a thing yet. Moved through hardware and operating systems very quickly for a while: Windows 98, 98 Second Edition, Millennium, 2000, XP, skipped Vista for Windows 7.

I was doing a lot of virtual-machine stuff by that point, primarily because I was so sick and tired of having to spend two full working days reinstalling Windows and all of my programs every six months, and with virtual machines I could just set up my environment and save a copy of the VM, then go back to it instead of reinstalling everything from scratch, or copy the VM to the laptop and back when I needed to travel. Started using Linux, beginning with Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger” in 2007 (tried to get into Red Hat earlier, but never managed it), because VMs didn’t work well with Microsoft’s increasingly-paranoid anti-piracy systems. After a dip into virtualizing Linux and Windows on Macs, back when Apple was producing decent and upgradeable x86-compatible laptop hardware, started building my own x86 desktops again, and buying cheap x86 laptops for when I had to travel. Spent almost all of my time in Linux (mostly Ubuntu, though I dabbled in other distributions), almost always in a virtual machine, because the hardware was inevitably designed for Windows and for the longest time Linux didn’t have the level of compatibility to work well as the base OS for them.

In 2019 I got my first Thinkpad, a T480, primarily because of the removable second battery. Linux actually worked on it, as the base OS, with no hardware incompatibilities! Installed a dual-boot Linux/Windows setup on it, same as I’d had on my desktops for a long time by that point, though I rarely booted into Windows on it except to update the firmware (again, same as my desktops). Upgraded the memory and storage on it, and I’m still using it, though the batteries are starting to show their age. Alas, my first Thinkpad will almost certainly also be my last, because Lenovo caught the Apple greed bug and has moved to soldered-in RAM and storage too. (Interesting side note though, I’ve heard recently that they’ve come out with machines with two non-soldered RAM slots, and user-replaceable storage, again. Apparently Framework has shown them the error of their ways, though they still don’t seem to prioritize full Linux compatibility like they used to. Sorry Lenovo, too little, too late.)

I’ve never been very happy with laptops. Coming from a build-your-own-desktop background, they just seemed so limited, and since nothing other than the memory and storage could be easily upgraded or replaced, they never lasted very long. The advent of USB greatly eased the upgradeability concern, but never dismissed it. Battery longevity still meant that I could never get more than a few years out of one (which is why I always went for cheap ones before the Thinkpad). They seemed like such a waste of money.

Like many of you, I heard about Framework from Linus Tech Tips, and was immediately intrigued. I didn’t need a new laptop at that point, but I’d been keeping an eye on the market, and I knew that all of the other manufacturers were headed in the opposite direction. Kept watching with increasing hope and delight as Framework fulfilled its initial promises. Then they announced the Framework 16, and the AMD motherboard for the Framework 13, and it was just a matter of deciding which one was going to replace the Thinkpad.

What finally decided me was the 16’s expansion bay. Not for the discrete GPU (I don’t do a lot of gaming these days, and my desktop serves that need admirably), but for the possibility of a second battery in the future – battery life is one of the most important things to me on a laptop. The larger screen was an additional bonus. Placed my order about a month ago, and I’m eagerly and (im)patiently waiting for Framework to ship my batch-17 system. :slight_smile:

A final note: I name my systems for networking purposes, and I’ve always stuck with a loose Greek-mythology theme. My most recent desktops have been athena, hephestus, and now hyperion; my last couple laptops have been hermes and pegasus. When I heard one of the LTT guys describe a Framework as his very own “laptop of Theseus,” I knew I’d found the right name for the new one. :smiley:

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lol I have the entire solar system object in my DNS :slight_smile: lots of greek mythology in there too!!

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:laughing: Yeah, I considered that, but with only eight planets, I’d have had to go with moons and asteroids before too long. Too hard to remember them.

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I used the Sun the planets and all their moons, and the asteroids and rocks which have names instead of numbers … So - I didn’t fill my class C range, then again, I don’t have that many systems (even though I have many connected for a 4 person household) :smiley:

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I use Sesame Street characters.

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Minor Simpsons characters.

My favorite gaming rig (circa 2008) was named Snake. Recently passed laptop was Milhouse.

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My current laptop is named “Fi” after the companion character from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I might just pass the name along to my framework since the modularity and upgradability is much more fitting for that character.

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Like others, reading the posts in here evokes some nostalgia/memories :slight_smile:

So the last laptop I bought (prior to the FW16) for personal use was actually my first one too:
Wikipedia: IBM_PC_Convertible
(yeah been a while, so just a little bit of an upgrade :grin:)

I have bought tablets and similar, but for laptops on the personal side I have been just working with hand-me-downs from friends and such. Had a number of desktops/servers at home, just not bought a laptop in a long time.

So I had been thinking I needed to get a new laptop and I wanted to get one I could run Linux on it as supported option. I had looked at System76 and was leaning that way on my research… when a friend and colleague asked if I had heard about framework. I hadn’t and so started looking (was earlyish 2023)

And I liked what I saw. Having modular options reminded me a bit of the old Dell (latitude 6xx series?) I had for work. It had a modular bay for 3.5" floppy, zip drives, and such. Official Linux support. So having an input bay that could take a numpad (optionally) along with the expansion bays was appealing.

I also liked the user group after being on the forums for a while as well as the company mindset on things like repairablity. I live in the area where iFixIt was founded and actually know one of the OG folks personally :slight_smile: and it made me quite happy to see this post from the head of framework when the FW16 was getting initial reviews:

My most recent hand-me-down laptop was an HP that started failing to boot, and I’m sure something that wouldn’t be bad to fix if they had the supportive community/company like framework.

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Surprised I didn’t reply in here yet.

Fell in love with computers as a teenager a few decades (?!) ago, as much the idea as the reality. I’ve always liked ridiculous hacker movies and so on. The Internet wasn’t quite so ubiquitous, so it was harder to come across good introductory information at the time, which was a real shame – though I tried, I couldn’t tap into good information about operating systems and low level programming when I was most interested and had the most time. Anyways, I begged my parents for a laptop, don’t remember if that was before or after I got temporary hand-me-down use of a 486…

I got some kind of a Compaq, used it until the screen hinges wore out, and then kept using it with the screen propped up against a stack of books.

If I remember right, the first laptop I bought for myself was a white-label Compal… HEL80? Sounds right. I think it was running a Core Duo – that is, dual core, 32-bit Intel processor, when two cores was a relatively new idea, and it meant your antivirus software wouldn’t render your Windows GUI nonresponsive. I remember replacing the motherboard at one point. It’s a pretty good historical analog to the Framework 16, really. The Framework captures a lot of what that machine was, including the bit sticking out behind the screen hinges, though, it was a battery not a graphics module. But it did have dedicated graphics (Nvidia 7600 maybe? numerological-wise, close to the ATIAMD 7700s) and a uh WSXGA+ screen, 1680x1050, IIRC, which was nice, 16:10. Small company, good warranty. The Framework is much easier to work on.

Somewhere around there I got a desktop, repurposed it into a “Linux server”, started running mdadm RAID arrays to store personal files and upgrading bits of hardware here and there, piecemeal. Case here, motherboard there, PCI card for more IDE connections, HDDs swapped out while keeping everything else, buying a few SATA-MOLEX adapters…

I was still primarily a Windows user until my first MacBook, which was one of those black plastic Intel Core 2 Duo models, back when the RAM, battery, and SSD were all socketed and user-replaceable. If I remember right, I was triple-booting Windows, macOS, and Linux. That laptop became my “primary” computer, and I went through a handful of MacBooks over the years, gradually moving toward VMs from dual-booting, gradually getting disillusioned with Apple’s increasing use of solder and glue and decreasing allocation of height to the keyboard.

Lately I’ve been strongly de-emphasizing Windows. Got one installation left, outside work, hasn’t been turned on in maybe a month or two. Windows 10 was the last straw and 11 is a hard no. I’ve got one foot in macOS still, but I’m waffling as to whether or not I want to cut ties with Apple. Pros and Cons.

The Framework ethos and laptops are very much of a piece with my preferences, ideals, and history. Love at first sight. I’m typing this on an 11th gen Intel Framework 13. Linux still lacks a lot of what macOS offers, though.

I’m trying to evangelize my dad – going to lend him my Framework 16 with a numpad swapped in and a separate SSD, to be closer to his preferences, as a trial – neat use of the modularity. (He’s had enough stupid Windows problems that I think it’ll be a sale IIF he can get a decent Excel experience out of Linux, somehow. If not I’ll push him toward a MacBook, as much as it pains me, because, Windows 11, not even once.)

My computers are mostly named after William Gibson and Neal Stephenson characters. This Framework borrows names from the Culture book series by Iain M. Banks. There’s some doozies in there. How do you like “Dastaveb Chamlis Amalk-ney Ep-Handra Thedreiskre Ostlehoorp”.

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I’d hate to have to type THAT onto a command line, every time I wanted to transfer some files to or from that machine. :laughing:

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that’s what autocomplete is for :grin:

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