The computer meme
A while back, I ran across a meme of listing all the computers you’ve owned. (Sorry, can’t remember where — happy to post links if you claim credit.) I thought I’d revive it in honor of the new computer that I’m anxiously awaiting — according to UPS’s tracking info, it left Shanghai early Sunday and is now en route from Louisville, KY.
0) My family’s first computer was my brother’s, which he got for his Bar Mitzvah. It was an Apple II+, and didn’t have a floppy drive when he first got it — you could record programs onto an audiocassette. My Palm is far more powerful than it was, but I’m still impressed with how much you could do with it. Screenwriter was a perfectly functional word processor, and VisiCalc an adequate spreadsheet. My brother and I spent hours playing the Infocom text adventures, and even my mother played Little Brick Out.
1) When my brother went to college, and took his computer with him, I soon made the case that I needed a computer of my own. Even though I was required to take typing in sixth grade, the idea of typing a paper with a typewriter was absolutely horrifying to me. For my Bat Mitzvah, I got an Apple IIc. I believe the "c" was for compact, and it was half the size of the II+. Unfortunately, affordable LCDs were far in the future, so it was never better than "luggable." It did have a modem, and I got onto my first BBS (Echo) using it.
2) The Apple IIc lasted me until my senior year in college. At that point, it was becoming increasingly less reliable, and I was afraid that if it crashed while I was writing my senior paper, no one else would have a computer that could read the disks. My parents bought me a Gateway PC. I’m pretty sure it ran Windows 3.1, not DOS.
2a) Sometime a couple of years later, something went wrong — I think with the video card. I discovered that no one else’s products could fit into the cute mini-tower case from Gateway. So I had the local computer store transplant all the brains from the Gateway into a generic standard size case and replace the fried card. That hybrid lasted me through graduate school.
3) At some point after we had moved to Virginia, I was coveting a laptop, but couldn’t justify their cost, since I really just wanted it for wordprocessing. I bought a used one off of eBay, a few years old. It turned out to be a lemon — the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and even plugged in, it often turned itself off without warning. This is the only thing I’ve ever bought off of eBay that I really felt like I got ripped off on.
4) A couple of years later, the Gateway computer crashed. After fighting with it for a few hours, my husband pointed out that I could get a brand new computer — much faster — for $600 from CompUSA. This one was a HP.
5) This was the first time I got a new computer because I wanted more processing power. About two years ago, as I was getting into digital photography, my husband gave me some tips on how to do things with Photoshop. I complained about how long they took to do, and he was surprised. When he tried for himself, he suggested I get a new computer. I got a $400 machine from Dell, and it was about 20 times faster.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been the most reliable machine — the hard drive crashed completely while it was still under warranty, and then this month one of the system files got corrupted, making it impossible to boot. T popped the hard drive out, and we can read it from another machine, so at least I can rescue the last month or so of un-backed up files. Once everything is copied safely over to my new machine, we’ll try reinstalling Windows. But I used this as an excuse to finally get a laptop.
What struck me most as I thought about this list is 1) how much more affection I have for the early Apples than for any of the PCs I’ve had in the years between and 2) how much shorter my replacement cycle has gotten. Some of that is because I’ve gotten more affluent, but it’s also because the price of computers has gotten so low. When I got the Gateway, a respectable desktop was going for about $1000, and the comparable laptop for twice that. Both those figures have fallen in half, in nominal dollars.
March 12th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
oh boy, nerd parade:
1. Zenith 8088. Lasted about 10 years. Good for blue-screen WordPerfect, lynx & other text internet, playing with DOS.
2. Gateway 386/25 (that’d be 25 Mhz) with a 40M hard drive. Solid machine, terrible service. Used it for 8 years. Recycled it in working condition, sans hdd, last year. Along with the 1200 baud external modem.
3. Compaq Aero 486. My first laptop. Bought it in ’96, still works, though I’m in the process of getting everything off the hdd. Runs Win 3.1.
4. A refurbished Dell P3/733, which a computer-center coworker called “last year’s hot rod.” Bought in 2000 when I admitted IE’s defeat of lynx. Still using it, but plan on storing it after I do the taxes.
5. G4 iBook. Bought it a couple of years ago after picking up some webmaster work, running out of arguments against buying a Mac, & being impressed by them as a reluctant OS X system administrator. It’s turned into my main computer & I seldom use the PC anymore. Been very impressed w/performance & tech support.
March 13th, 2006 at 1:26 am
whee — my nerd list would be impossible, because I have a lab and have had/purchased computers at work for myself (that is, I get to pick them). Do those count?
If not, I’ll just list my first & last:
first: a Heathkit, used 8 inch floppies, and destroyed the floppies if the computer crashed while they were in the drive. I programmed in basic on it, and played Adventure.
last: a Mac Mini, purchased this January.
Except for the heathkit (purchased by my dad, not as a kit, incidentally), we have steadfastly spent money only on Macs, from the first in 1986 to the latest in 2006. Wow, 20 years of Macs. Ignoring any other issue, they’re just physically beautiful, and always have been. I’ve never understood why the PC world can’t incorporate beautiful design around whatever else it has.
bj
March 13th, 2006 at 1:36 am
PS: I just counted, and realized there are actually 7 computers in my house right now, 5 desktop machines, and 2 laptops (though the two laptops are owned by work). And, only 2 computers have ever been retired (and neither died, just became superfluous, or simply to old to use). We always moved old computers to new uses in the old days, because the macs never died.
bj
March 13th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Extra nerd points for starting your list with the zeroth element. 😉
March 13th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Wow, what a mac love-fest. I didn’t own a computer until my dh and I moved in together–that was an Apple SE (we still have it, ‘decorating’ our living room). Since then, we’ve been all-Mac, all the time–right now I have a PowerBook G4 for my work computer, and we have an iMac at home.
March 13th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Many years ago, a friend of mine worked on the factory floor at Dell. She told horror stories about people dropping parts and sticking them back into the computers, the dust and dirt, etc. The stories stuck and I have never bought a Dell, no matter how highly I’ve heard them praised.
March 13th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
My first was also an Apple II+ (back in ’82), but I had the external floppy drive — definitely better than the tape. It had no shift key, so to get the word processor to distinguish caps and lowercase, you had to use ESC (caps displayed black on green instead of the reverse, but they printed OK).