The biggest impact would be to max out the memory. That will not help with browsers like Firefox, but will help with other items.

Plus there is a whole world out there that many people ignore or do not know about, USENET and IRC. Accessing those will work with just about any Thinkpad, no matter how old. Plus there is toot for Mastodon (I need to get that working), but not sure if there is a text utility to access lemmy

I have a Thinkpad which is a bit newer then yours (R51e) with OpenBSD on it. I get by quite well with dillo, links (need to try links2), mutt, tin (USENET) and irssi (IRC). All I did is maxed out memory to 2G. But, I never do banking on the Internet. All I do is need to do is get my pdf bank statement once a month which I use a newer Thinkpad for.

No, to write to a CD, you need to use specialized software, not just a simple copy.

Plus what about copying to replaced a files already on the CD ? I believe you need to clear it first then rewrite everything back. CD are about as inconvenient as a media can get.

Nothing except for the limited size. I believe even today, nothing exists today for temp storage that have the convenience of diskettes.

USB Flash Drives comes close, but cheaper versions can in rare cases have firmware “virises”. On a diskette, just do a format and all issues gone. Also I never even thought twice about mailing a file on a diskette expecting to never see that diskette again. Flash Drives, I still would like to get it back after mailing it out :)

I remember working in a warehouse that stored many ICs when I was very young. IIRC, Zilog packaging was quite good. Some other brands packages would crack or open up if nor handled with “kid gloves”. This brings back memories,

A couple:

1. CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.

2. A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.

I can almost laugh now :)

Normally I would say anything over 10 years old. But due to how 10 year old computers are fully useable, I am thinking anything with 1 core. Maybe in a few years it could be ones without a TMP2 :)

2400 on a 386SX IIRC, I was late to the game. I started connecting when I moved to Coherent OS from DOS. I used kermit to dial into work. Work would then call back so I would avoid any charges:)

They had USENET on a SUNOS plus I could download source for items I wanted.