IT was a matter of survival, sort of, a tough 10 day roaming Connemara, far from the comforts of a 24 hour shop, or a landline telephone, or a desktop computer. It was the great outdoor computing withdrawal survival adventure.
There were compensations. The biggest was not having to go on the radio and explain daily just how miserable you were. There was also, in case of necessity, a laptop computer and a mobile phone.
Actually, it wasn't hardship at all. But it was the same week as That radio programme's survival event. It required 10 days in west Galway, a region only lately coloured light purple in Eircell's GSM coverage map. There was some work to be done, helping the Roundstone based company Folding Landscapes put itself on the Web and some of Tim Robinson's maps and research into electronic form. And base camp was a house on the edge of the sea, next stop Nova Scotia, hidden from the purple marked GSM signal by a glorious hill.
Some things became apparent pretty quickly. Like the fact that the Toshiba laptop didn't have enough RAM. At the bottom of Toshiba's range, the Satellite 110CS comes with a colour screen, Pentium 75 processor and choice of Windows 95 or Windows for Workgroups at about £1,200 but only 8MB of RAM. This will run Win 95 in the same sort of way that a carving knife will kill an angry rhinoceros if used correctly. You just wouldn't want to depend on doing it every day.
A RAM upgrade was 200 miles away in Dublin, so there was nothing for it but to dig deep for reserves of character, stamina and will and get on with it. In fact, getting on with it was helped a lot by setting the Tosh to "presume" rather than boot mode and enabling panel power on. That meant that rather than wait minutes for it to haul itself into sensibility when you pressed the power switch the machine would "remember" its state when told to suspend itself and wake up in half the tide.
The place of the power switch was taken by the display panel. Opening it awoke the PC and closing it sent it into suspense. It saved minutes on each start up shutdown cycle. There were two snags. It took far too long initially to find and apply the suspend mode settings in the Toshiba hardware setup and the power needed to hold the machine in suspense took about an hour of battery power a day. This was out of a meagre 2.6 hours battery operation when fully charged, so even with minimal use it meant recharging every day.
A quick startup was not just a sop to impatience. Since base camp was outside the range of the mobile phone signal, email was collected when it could be. A five minute halt on the hilltop next to the Alcock and Brown memorial, connect the phone, start the laptop and see whether anyone cares enough to mail.
The phone didn't disappoint and it wouldn't want to at the price. The Nokia 2110 (£250, plus VAT) required a Nokia data card (yes £250, plus VAT). It is one of life's little mysteries that a PC Card to connect a digital computer to a digital phone costs rather more than a PC Card modem, which at least has to perform the chore of making a digital PC talk to the analogue (landline) phone system. But then modem prices have always moved in mysterious ways and PC Cards have taken on the same habit.
Anyway, the Nokia recharged in an hour and chugged away for days on one charge, provided connection time was minimal. And it was possible to keep the costly connect time down. Log on four times a day to collect waiting e mail and upload messages prepared in advance and it was no more than 10 to 12 minutes in total.
You learn who your friends are when you're operating this way - they're the ones who turn e mail around on the spot rather than two days later.
After a couple of days of this it became clear that this was the way to use a mobile phone: to connect two ever available computers for just long enough to swap their yarns. It was infinitely more productive than hanging on the end of one and indulging in telephonetag. (You know the game, it's where you phone my office three times and I do the same to yours before we ever actually get to speak.)
The 9,600 bits per second connection available on the GSM network was fine for email, but too slow for using the Web. Even with images turned off, it fizzed and whizzed for an expensive age before loading a page.
Putting the discomforts to one side, it was a good time. It got close to the ideal of a complete office in a small carry case. Anyone who e mailed me got a response a few hours later and the work in hand - preparing some basic Web pages and working on a database design - got done.
It was only when packing up to return to Dublin that it struck me just how compact the mobile office was. It took up far less space than the child's buggy which had remained unused on the rocky roads of Connemara.