Sunday, May 25, 2014 — More results from my shack cleaning … I uncovered an ancient IBM Thinkpad the thickness of the B volume in the World Book Encyclopedia set I just 
threw out last week. The poor old laptop look the worse for wear … it looked like it had coffee spilled on and had been trampled underfoot for a time. I had found the power adapter for the thing back during Christmas, and rather than throw it out, I set it aside, believing the laptop was still in my possession … somewhere.
The laptop is an IBM Thinkpad 755CX model, equipped with a floppy drive and a then-massive 1.2 GB hard drive. It’s vintage 1995 or so, and its original Windows 3.11 OS was upgraded to Windows 98SE. But does it still work?
I reunited the power supply (and its weird 3-pin connector) with the laptop and two indicators came to life — a good sign. I opened it up … the keyboard and LCD screen were dirty and dusty. It took me a couple of minutes to find the “on” switch (left side near the rear corner), but surprise surprise — it came to life!
It booted up perfectly to the long-forgotten desktop, filled with files and icons of my work 10 years ago. OK, neat enough … no, wait … hmmm, what’s this? A bunch of icons from N3FJP logging programs. Digging a little deeper, I found contest logs for 2003-06 … CQWW, November Sweepstakes, CQWPX, VHF, ARRL DX, IARU HF, etc.
I signed up for LOTW back when it was first created, but never did anything with it. But now I have these logs — quite a few of them — and I’m signing back up for LOTW so I can upload them … I’m thinking that I have DXCC sitting in those logs (not to mention my paper logs along the way). The N3FJP can easily output Cabrillo files and other formats, so submitting the logs shouldn’t be a problem. The biggest problem may be transferring the files from the old Thinkpad to one of my newer PCs … I don’t have a spare 3-1/2-inch floppy disk laying around these days, hi!
I am interested in doing more with the ARRL Centennial awards, so LoTW is a big hlep there as well. We’ll see.
That’s it for now … more to come. 73.
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