#4

I've owned three computers in my life.

Until today.

If you were to ask the people in my office how I should format the phrase "I finally bought a new PC," I believe the consensus would be that "finally" should be 72-point, bold, italic, underlined, and blinking.

The first, the one that turned me into the geek I am today, was a Tandy Color Computer 3. We got it for Christmas in 1986. When others were messing around with Commodore 64s, my CoCo was packing twice as much RAM, and could manage 640x192 with 256 colours. My career path started with transcribing BASIC programs out of the manual at age 9 - that's Extended Color BASIC 2.0, baby. We got a disk drive the following Christmas (and Disk Extended Color BASIC 2.1) and I could finally save my own programs. Later, my mother found a guy in Fredericton who was into CoCos and provided us with hundreds of games and other programs. One thing that sticks in my mind about the CoCo - you could overclock it by putting a value into a particular memory location. The normal speed was 0.89 MHz, and "POKE 65497, 0" jacked it up to 1.8 MHz. A number of the games I had required this "high speed poke" to play correctly.

The second was the only reason I got my first job. It was May 1992, I'd been using PCs at school for a few years, and I decided I wanted one of my own. I started working at Save-Easy as a cashier and stock clerk, three weeks before my fifteenth birthday. I remember my first paycheque was $115 for 23 hours of work. By November I'd made enough to buy the PC I wanted and she was a beauty. 386SX/33, 2MB of RAM, 512K video, and an enormous 107MB hard drive, with a 24-pin colour printer (the ubiquitous Panasonic KXP-2123) following a few months later. It served me well throughout high school and the first few years of university, and the time I spent learning that machine inside and out pretty much got me my first Co-op job as a help desk tech.

The third came along out of necessity more than anything else. My 386 (and it feels funny saying "386" when in reality it was just a lowly SX) had been pretty much taxed to its limits running gcc under Debian Linux for my Data Structures assignments in early 1997. (At that point I had a 130MB drive with a 60MB Windows partition, a 60MB main Linux partition, and 10MB of Linux swap space.) The NB government put on a promotion in the fall of '97 where they rebated the HST on any new PC purchase. It was time - I finally broke down and upgraded to a Pentium/166MMX with 32MB of RAM, a 4MB video card, and a 4GB disk. That box lasted me seven years and eleven months.

It's not that I'm a masochist. Let the record show that my employer and the agency to which I am contracted out have seen fit to provide me with very nice laptops over the last several years. I'm not a big gamer, and the Pentium was, until recently, an adequate machine for web browsing and email when I didn't have the laptop at home. So the CD writer hadn't been working right for months - it still played PokerStars just fine. Note the past tense.

I name my boxes after Sarah McLachlan songs. I dare you to laugh. Fine, go ahead and laugh, I don't care. elsewhere started freezing up Thursday night. I tried booting my rarely-used Linux partition. I worked on a Sudoku for a couple of minutes, then looked up expecting to see a login prompt. Instead I saw a stack dump and "kernel panic, aiee!" (or something to that effect... it really did say "aiee!" though, which made me smile despite the impending death of my machine - gallows humour can be comforting). I opened it up, swapped the RAM to another bank, pulled and reseated some of the connectors, started it back up, and it was fine. For about fifteen minutes.

At work on Friday, I made an appeal for 72-pin SIMMs. I dare you to laugh. To hell with it, that is funny. Andrew thought he had some kicking around and offered to bring them in. Phil chimed in that Andrew was just enabling my continued presence in the PC dark ages. Coming back from lunch at Mexi's, my stomach full of nachos, I decided it might finally be time. With the 386 (SX) and the Pentium, I bought from local independents and spec'd out every last detail. My interest in PC hardware had not yet waned to its current state of near non-existence. This time, I went to Russ, the acknowledged master of cheap PCs. We talked for a bit, and he emailed a friend that works at Future Shop. There's a Compaq Presario on the front page of this week's flyer. P4 3GHz, 512MB RAM, 80 GB 7200rpm HD, CD writer, DVD-ROM, 17" LCD monitor, Epson printer/scanner combo - $799. I bought one.

And the peanut gallery rejoiced.

I've still got #1 and #2, packed away in my storage room. I dig the CoCo out every now and again to play an old game. It freezes up occasionally but it still runs pretty well. Not sure why the 386 is still in there - though it is the only PC in the house with a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and you never know when you might need one of those. The new box doesn't have a floppy drive of any size.

fumbling, I hope you're still kicking in 2012. And I hope I can get your big brother kicking again - it might make a decent little toy Linux box. Andrew, about those 72-pin SIMMs...

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Current Mood: utterly delighted