Looking for stuff that you forgot to throw out

[Bill Freeman]

I've been gifted with a Dell Latitude LX 475D laptop.

This thing is so old, it doesn't have USB.

This thing is so old, it doesn't have ethernet (or WiFi).

This thing is so old, it doesn't have a CD drive.

This thing is so old, it's running WFW 3.11.

It has the as delivered 4Mb of RAM and 300 some odd MB of HD

It's a 100MHz 486, with a floppy drive.

But it does have a legacy serial port (and parallel port), so
it's a candidate for talking to my girlfriend's weather station
(which uses waggling of the modem control signals, rather than
the TxD/RxD lines, at speeds you can't accomplish with a USB
serial dongle), assuming that it's software is old enought to
run on 3.11 (I'm certainly not going to by an W98 license for
it) or under Wine, maybe.

But connectivity for software installation is an issue.  Yeah,
I may be able to find a desktop with a working floppy drive,
and I may still have some media.  Or I can probably do PLIP
(though not to a machine that lives at my girlfriend's house).

But the thing does have a pair of PCMCIA slots.  N.B., PCMCIA,
not card bus.

So I'm looking for the loan of one or more of a PCMCIA ethernet,
WiFi, USB, and/or CD equipment, so I can figure out if it's
worth buying one of the first three.

Is anyone's junk box too deep for their own good?

Bill