Breathe Deep, Seek Peace

happy pride edition of this post lol. wont bog down the post explaining our situation, but we still need consistent help affording all our living expenses. my wife works but her job pays shit and i am trying to find work to no avail. i have the usual pay apps, as does my wife. we also have other options (like our patreon for monthly bills) and our registry if u wanna support that way. please consider helping make two struggling black queer folks' lives easier this pride month 🩷

$564.13/$1250.13 for rent (9 days past due)

$0/$45 for negative bank balance and food

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

Pickles being a drunk disaster as usual

Someone come get him before he acts a fool