A brief personal computing history

Today I realized that I haven't purchased a computer for myself since around 1997.

At some time in the mid-eighties, our family had a TI 99/4A computer. I don't really remember using it for much beyond playing games, though I know that I learned a little bit of programming on it. I know that the New Orleans Central Library did not consistently title books on the system, as I had to search for "TI 99 4A," "TI 99/4A." "TI 99\4A," and "TI 994A" to find books on the subject. At the time, the price point for getting network access prevented me from any online research.

In 1986, my grandmother bought me a Commodore 64. I distinctly remember purchasing a 1200 baud modem from Toys R Us for $89. With this modem, I connected. I couldn't afford Q-Link, the pay-per-minute online service that eventually became AOL, and my parents wouldn't let me make international long distance calls (much less any other long distance calls), but I did have my own phone line. In New Orleans, I belonged to several of the dozens of BBSs, and even ran one of my own for a while. I had many happy years with my Commie, joining my first user groups, pirating my first software, doing my first hardware hacking, the list goes on and on.

I bought my first computer sometime in the early nineties, before I left high school. I paid about $1,200 for a 386 IBM clone with a 100MB hard drive, both kinds of floppy drive (remember those?), and probably about 16 megabytes of RAM- though it could have had only eight megs of RAM. It came with MS-DOS version 5. "Lazarus," as I eventually called the machine, stayed with me throughout several incarnations. I upgraded it first to a 387, then to a 486SX, and eventually to a 486DX. At some point, I bought the MS-DOS 6.22 upgrade (the last pre-Windows version). I most commonly played StarCon and Civilization one, used WordPerfect 5.1 for papers and stories, and good old Telix for modem work. I had Windows 3.11, but most of my applications (and games) lived in DOS. Lazarus and its 100MB hard drive still functioned pre-Katrina, though it basically existed to test some extremely low-end floppy-based Linux distributions.

Shortly after college, in 1997, I had the opportunity to make use of one of two laptops a roommate had- I called them "Black Box" and "Beige Box." Both systems had 486 processors and awful battery life, but the Compaq-branded Beige Box had more memory and a trackball built into the right-hand side of the screen, with its buttons on the back. I still miss that ergonomic design, which allowed full keyboard access while mousing, something that many modern trackpads interfere with. I still used Lazarus as my primary system, using the laptops for lightweight tasks in more comfortable locations. Both systems had Windows 95.

In 1998, I purchased my first laptop, Digital Equipment Corporation's HiNote VP 717, for $900 from a friend. I eventually dubbed this system "Barnacle" due to its tenacity. At the time, a good friend had almost convinced me to purchase one of the new fruit flavored iMacs. If I had purchased one of those systems, I likely could still have used it actively as an OS X machine. As it happens, you can still buy one of those iMacs for $100-$200. The HiNote won't fetch more than $20 even if it worked. Barnacle represented my first foray with Linux, as I flirted briefly with Red Hat Linux version 6 around 1999. I successfully got an external ZIP drive and my wacky PCMCIA modem working, but video problems plagued me, and I eventually went the Windows 98 route, going back to Eudora for email. Major games included SimCity, but not the Sims- poor Barnacle didn't have the speed to run it. In mid-2000, I dropped it while moving a desk and broke the screen. I continued to use my laptop with an external monitor, effectively turning it into a desktop system. Around 2003, I found a replacement screen on eBay for $25 (as opposed to $500+ when it broke), installed the part, and Barnacle became a Linux test box for lightweight distros, such as Damn Small Linux. Its battery eventually gave out, and I did not salvage it from New Orleans.

In early 2001, I did some work for an architect friend of mine I met doing tech support for a friend. She paid me in cash, as well as with an old computer she no longer used. This system, now dubbed "Fornit," started life as a Red Hat 8 system for Cat, as she hadn't had a computer of her own in ages. Fornit stood about three feet tall, had a plastic foot bezel for support, and weighed a ton. I consider it my first real in-kind gift.

In mid-2002, I received a free system as a gift from my then-employer. "Sandbox" cost $300 and came with Linux. A low-end Wintergreen system with an 1100 MHz Athlon processor and a 10 GB hard drive, Sandbox became my primary gaming and web-goofing system, as most of my work happened on my Linux system at work. Eventually, its CPU fan clogged with dust and stopped, leading to a fried processor. A good man from the New Orleans Linux Users Group gave me a spare proc he had lying around. Eventually, virtually every part on that system failed: its memory, its hard drive, its proc, its power supply, and I think its optical drive.

Sometime in 2003, I did some more in-kind work for a lawyer friend of mine and got another cast-off system. This timed nicely with the death of Sandbox. I never gave this system a name. Mostly I played emulated and older games on this system- C64, SNES, DOS.

In mid 2004, while at Tulane, a student gave me a semi-dead G3 iBook for parts. Its optical drive broke when she dropped something on it while open, and it had a flashing question mark indicating that it couldn't boot- a dead hard drive. Before the holiday season, I had repaired it to usability. "FrankenMac," my current system, has had more surgery and more invasive surgery than any other system I've owned. I've replaced its 20GB hard drive, its optical drive twice (first a combo drive, then a plain CD-ROM), and a reed switch in the display. I also scrounged a power adapter. All told, FrankenMac utilizes parts from six different machines.

The two Windows boxes I evacuated from New Orleans need to go back to their owners. I may buy a cheap Dell for games. Right now, unemployed, I have no line on donated systems or acquired pieces parts. Rumor Control says that Apple plans to release a new, Intel-based line of iBooks come the end of January.

Thanks for listening.