Pretty useless
Yesterday I had a rather infortunate event regarding a packet sniffer and my ThinkPad's network drivers. Long storty short: upon installing a certain software the darn thing just went "kaboom" in terms of connectivity. No WiFi, no Ethernet, not even bluetooth.
After denial came action. Thank god for the Ubuntu R50 sitting around here. I went to lenovo support site and downloaded the drivers and access connections. Right then I realized I had no way to get stuff from Computer 1 to Computer 2. I have come to rely so much on using networks to get stuff around my various PCs, that I had no blank CDs (or DVDs) and no memory key at hand.
While I watched a perfectly functional but not-able-to-connect PC I thought on how much stuff has changed. When I started doing things with IBM-compatible computers (on an 086 PC that had a beautiful Orange Hercules screen that could give you a nice sun tan) one had just the stuff that coud fit the 40MB drive or that could get loaded into one or several floppy disks.
Then came dial-up. At that time I was at the university, so I had to be very careful that the cost of dialing up to the ISP would not take over my "eating budget". This didn't always work and I ended up eating just rice for a couple of weeks because the phone bill arrived inflated. I can remember going to forums, opening as many pages as I could, disconnecting, writing down all replies and stuff, reconnecting and hitting "send" all around the place.
Then came Broadband and the rest is history.
My email signature reads "I do web stuff". When I can't access the internet I feel pretty useless, I must admit.