I still need to read “The Soul of a New Machine”, should I save this until after?
It's unrelated to the book, other than the title.
Stop reading HN and read the book now. You’re welcome. ;)
That's a great book to read, after that pick up The Cuckoo's Egg.
Soul of a New machine is a great read, never slow or self-gratifying, highly recommended
I also have a few machines I'm attached to. When I was fresh out of school I got a job at a startup writing PHP and bought myself an (at the time) brand new Thinkpad X220 with a Sandy Bridge i7 inside.
My 9 year old has it now. The battery is toast but the machine still faithfully trundles along. It plays Rollercoaster Tycoon on Fedora Linux. We're building a robot together for her birthday, so I'll be trying to install the Arduino tool chain on it.
I'll definitely miss that machine when it's no more.