Scratchy the Micron

Have you heard of Crusty the Mac, the indestructable Macintosh SE? Let me tell you the story of Scratchy the Micron. Scratchy was a Micron Transport Trek 2 laptop, one of the best laptops money could buy in 1998. And you needed a lot of money to buy one. It cost $2,999 when it was new in 1998, the equivalent of $5,600 in today’s money.

The Micron Transport Trek 2 laptop

You may have heard of Micron. Micron makes computer memory and solid-state storage. But in the ’90s, Micron also sold its own line of PCs. And the Trek 2 was their best laptop at the time. It was a high-spec machine for its day, with a 366 MHz Intel Pentium II CPU. But it squeezed a bit more performance out of that CPU than many competing laptops. And it only weighed 7.2 pounds, which was pretty impressive in 1998. A Taiwanese OEM called Alpha-Top built the Trek 2 for Micron, which was a pretty common arrangement at the time.

My then-employer only bought Trek 2s for a select few employees. One of those employees was a guy we’ll call Ian. I figure it’s best not to use his real name even though it’s been more than 20 years. Longtime readers of this blog may remember the story of Barfy. Ian was the cranky Windows NT administrator in that story.

Barfy was my fault. But Ian topped me with Scratchy.

Scratchy’s story really begins in the spring of 2001. By then, Scratchy the Micron was showing its age. But replacing something that cost 5.6 grand wasn’t something you did lightly. That employer had a three-year replacement cycle, and Crusty wasn’t yet a full three years old. Ian was known for a few things, but patience wasn’t really one of them. Adding memory and swapping the hard drive for a newer, faster model would have gone a long way toward improving Scratchy’s performance, but Ian wasn’t having any of that.

Then one morning, Ian came into work with a story.

Scratchy’s journey

The way Ian told it, that morning, he’d taken Scratchy out of his laptop bag, set Scratchy on the roof of his car, then put his bag in the car and absentmindedly forgot all about that small matter of a $5,600 computer on the roof. He sat down in the driver’s seat, closed the door, turned the key, and drove to work. Then when he arrived, only then did he realize his laptop bag was empty, and remember that whole bit about taking his laptop out of his bag and putting it on the car roof.

Needless to say, when he arrived at work, there was no laptop on the roof of his car.

So that’s how Ian got a brand-spankin’-new laptop before his old one was a full three years old.

Little did Ian know that Scratchy the Micron was anything but dead. But he would find out soon enough.

Scratchy’s return

The rest of us always disagreed about whether Ian accidentally drove to work with a laptop on his roof, or “accidentally” drove to work with a laptop on his roof. If it was an “accident,” Ian made a tactical mistake. He neglected to remove his business card from Scratchy before the deed. Back then, laptops frequently had a plastic sleeve bonded to the case for you to slip your business card in, in case you ever lost it or left it somewhere. Or if it didn’t, it was customary to tape your business card to the laptop body somewhere.

Someone found Scratchy, with Ian’s business card still attached, and gave our front desk a call. And the stories didn’t completely line up.

The way this other guy told it, he was behind Ian on Missouri Highway 21 when he exited onto Interstate 270. And as the two of them accelerated, he saw a black object the size of a large book fly out the window of Ian’s car. Startled, he pulled over to see what it was, and found Scratchy on the shoulder of the road. Since it looked like a pretty expensive laptop, he figured we probably wanted it back.

So maybe Scratchy managed to hang onto the roof of Ian’s car on the journey from his subdivision to the interstate, only flying off once he reached a speed higher than about 45 miles per hour. Or maybe Ian hurled Scratchy out the window. Depending on how far away the witness was and where he was looking, the witness may not have been able to tell the difference. I guess either one is possible, though I personally find the window more plausible.

Regardless of precisely how Scratchy ended up on the shoulder of the road and how big of an accident it was, the witness had Scratchy, and the witness turned Scratchy over to us. What happened next surprised us all.

Scratchy’s surprise

We found Scratchy had a few scrapes, hence the name. But Scratchy’s LCD screen somehow was intact. And when we powered Scratchy on, it was in working order. It finished its power on tests without complaint, then booted right up into Windows. Spinning-rust hard drives don’t typically like hurtling 10 feet and landing on concrete or gravel, but this one didn’t seem to mind. The only damage we found was when we opened the CD-ROM drive, where we found a shattered disc. But after we cleaned that out, we put a good disc in the drive, and even that worked.

That’s why I hesitate to say Scratchy came back to haunt Ian. Scratchy was every bit as alive as Ian’s new laptop.

We asked the managers what they wanted us to do with it, and they said to give Scratchy back to Ian. And that’s how Ian ended up with two laptops.

I don’t know what happened to Scratchy the Micron after that. Ian took a new job five states away soon after and didn’t give Scratchy back. But I hope Scratchy lived a long and useful life as a test machine, either for Ian or for someone else. It would be a fitting end to Scratchy’s story.

What Micron thought of Scratchy’s story

But that’s not exactly the end of Scratchy’s story. We had contacts at Micron, so we told them the story. They were amused. We even suggested they use it in an ad campaign. After all, not every laptop can survive being tossed onto the shoulder of an interstate on-ramp.

But Micron never did anything with the story, probably for a few reasons. When Micron discontinued the Trek 2, it switched OEMs and started reselling laptops built by Samsung. The Samsung-built Microns didn’t look very much like a Trek 2. Also, by 2001, Micron was working to divest its PC business because it wasn’t turning a profit for them.

And that’s a shame. I always thought Micron’s computers were good products, and very underrated. Scratchy the Micron isn’t the only reason, but it’s the most colorful reason.