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

David Pescovitz at 12:39 pm Mon, Oct 29, 2012

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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.