Auction of laptop used by Clinton to email John Glenn in space

Hurry, hurry, this is your chance to own the Toshiba Satellite Pro that President Bill Clinton used to email John Glenn in space on November 6, 1998. Apparently, the laptop belonged to a member of Clinton's medical staff who helped the president send the email to orbit. The laptop is listed at $125,000. Wonder how much RAM is in it. "Bill Clinton computer -Presidential email on it, to John Glenn in space!"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: astronauts • auction • clinton • Space

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Antlan

1988, Clinton wasn’t President then…
- http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux
  
  I have a laptop from about 1988 and it is a considerably more primitive, DOS-only affair. Made by Zenith. 1998 is when Glenn flew on the shuttle.
- kartwaffles
  
  Are you sure? 1988 was right around the time when Al Gore invented the internet.
matt6666

um clinton was elected in 1992… something is wrong with this post.
http://twitter.com/SteveZStein Steve Stein

1998.
- David Pescovitz
  
  Correct. Clumsy finger on my part. And in fact, the auction lister made the same typo in the listing. Thanks!
Petzl

To quote L. Skywalker: “What a piece of junk!”
oasisob1

Too much time travel up in here.
http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker

As far as I can tell, the machine is a Satellite Pro 405CS (I think I can make that out on the display bezel, and it looks identical to the 405CSes that I owned).

That means it was about a 3 year old machine when this happened.

Pentium 75, proprietary RAM module, 8 MiB on the motherboard, 8 to 32 in the module slot.
nixiebunny

I have a receipt from 1997 for 32MB of RAM that cost $750. I’m going to the store today to buy 16GB for $120. Go figure.
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

I have an Apple Newton, circa ’95 if anyone is interested. It can send and receive faxes, email and surf the web using a PCMCIA 56.6 Kb/ps modem. Selling for much less than $125K. Hey, I’ll even throw in a hard copy issue of the indie ‘zine “bOING bOING” with an article about how to use ARCHie, and FTP to “get high weirdness” using DOS.