Laptop from the 1800s

What about this one:
M20.jpg

And I like this one too (It's a Mac)
Dj-1.jpg

But really, Vaughn, you're a music geek also, wouldn't you like this guitar amp?
29-Guitar-Amp.jpg

...art
(these also "stolen" from here -- check out his school bus RV conversion, if you want to see something really ambitious.)
 
Steampunk is Soooo cool!

Art beat me to it, Jake Von Slatt's bus is awesome. Think victorian era School bus camper conversion... he took a diesel pusher flat front bus and made a rolling cabin out of it.

great... now I just lost 10 minutes to reading up on steampunk. *sigh* things to do when I have a fully functioning shop and time to spend in it...
 
In all seriousness, laptops in the 1800's was brought to an exceptional level. Unlike today in which we shoot snappy emails at lightning speed and just abuse the English language and grammar to no-end, in the 1800's it was the opposite.

Letter writing was not only done to convey messages and to stay in touch, it was done as a form of recreation and a lot of pride went into it. Calligraphy was often practiced and presented in the letter, and words were well thought out and rather elaborate. With no television or radio to listen to, those with education enough to write; not only did so, they did so in an artful way!

To that end many woodworkers were employed to build lap desks which were the precursor to the laptop we know now. Many were very elaborate and a lot of skill and attention to detail went into them. Sitting on a train, they would often write away to love ones as a vast world began to get smaller and smaller. Even George Washington's lap desk is preserved at the Smithsonian Museum because of its importance to our countries independence and history.

In some ways the attention to detail our computer programmers use in the laptops of today have come full circle. For the educated traveling man of the 1800's, a lap top was just as vital as it is to the traveling business person of today...its just the grammar has gotten sloppy! (LOL)

(As in Laughing Out Loud and not 1800 shorthand for Lots Of Lumps in my feather pillow !) :rofl:
 
Completely agree Travis, courtesy formulas and sentences that were used in specific contexts and overall what is known a good manners prevailed those days.

The speed at wich information travels today has made that dissapear for worse.

Besides the fact of having to think about how were you going to say a thing made one structure the whole thing in a more understandable way.

Bouncing an e-mail back to sombody without a word of explanation or just attaching a file to an e-mail to somebody who is not even expecting it is common practice nowadays that only leads to misunderstandings and lost time.
 
I read somewhere that a company executive decided to do something about productivity in his company, and eliminated the internet. Productivity actually soared because people began to work instead of being on the internet and they were making personal phone calls instead of emails and getting more sales from that.

I have no doubt that it would, but I'm not sure I would work there. :type:
 
Oh, sorry Vaughn for the Thread Drift. It did kind of look like this thread lost steam. My original reply on this was not to steer it away from your woodworking pictures but to show that the original laptops were truly important and elaborate woodworking projects.
 
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