I was struck by this weeks Blog Challenge from Lorelle on WordPress. The assignment was to describe my computer setup then and now. I thought cool a bit of time to reminiscence about the good old days. Well that isn’t quite how it worked out.My first computer was a Trash 80, followed by a Mac Classic then I was back to PC with out even thinking twice.
That was a 386, followed quickly by a 486 then a Pentium 100. By this time I had moved up to a whole meg of ram on my video card and replaced the original sound blaster I bought with a new sound blaster 16 I believe and some really expensive yet crappy sounding speakers. I liked to tell myself this was because the music itself had crappy compression. Not to mention if I wanted to listen to music, I had a good stereo with huge kick ass floor speakers.
At some point in time between the 486 and the P100 came my first laptop, first scanner, and a variety of printers. There was the genesis from the dot matrix which included a wide dot matrix for doing financial reports. I still wish I had that one for editing hard copy of novels. Then there were two hp laserjets, which all got trumped when I got my first Epson color printer. The first time I replaced the ink cartridges and realized I could buy a whole new printer with cartridges for the same price, I began a path of landfill usage. I was a bad bad man. I have since gone back to laser printing almost exclusively using recycled paper to make up for my past transgressions. Buying refill toner kits online is also much cheaper.
The next computer was a giant leap forward moving to a Pentium 266 mmx with 128 meg of ram and two 10gb hard drives. Man was it fast when Win 98 came out. The computer, humbly called Ralf, however was a Packard Hell from sears. There were a few computers in a row right after that one a PII 350, a 500, then a PIII 750 sporting Win 2k with a full gig of ram.
The move to lightning speeds above 1gig came not so long after the first P3. This is where the journey stayed for some time, kind of. I added ever more hard drives from this wonderfully cheap place called eBay. I got my first high speed connection shortly after Napster went online. I also rediscovered sound when I got my first DVD player and surround sound system The crappy theater in a box spewed out tunes from my computer’s upgraded Sound Blaster Audigy and eventually brought video to my 36″ JVC television. These were what some might refer to as our salad days of bliss. Things couldn’t get much better. They did however get much worse.
Finances and fears of law suits caused us to scale back our digital lifestyle. When computers quit working we were sort of glad no one wanted to buy Ralf or his predecessor. We could go online and that was about all we really needed, since the library had invested heavily in DVD’s. We could also make our own porn if we really wanted too.
Things got better slowly. Cheap AMD machines started getting built at first in old cases with old cards and drives, and some questionable uses of our OS disks. Things have continued to evolve bringing mine and my wife’s computers into great uses in our everyday world of pop culture. Our computers all carry legit copies of windows, only because they came that way. Our next batch though will be Linux which we have dual booted now. However I don’t see any new machines anytime soon with a new baby on the way. On the other hand we really don’t need new machines right now, as windows fails we will simply become Linux users by default which runs a lot faster even if we haven’t gotten use to the idea of abandoning our pop culture icon, windows.
In many respects I have de-evolved or maybe just revolved going full circle with some things. My sound comes from a card that is older than my operating system, but it pumps it into a 30 year old Sansui integrated amplifier with a 1/4″ mic input and equalized with a 30 band equalizer so I can podcast in clarity. My music comes out of either quietly through high quality Grado headphones plugged into the onboard sound card or driven through a pair of 30″ tall Marrantz 3-ways on my desk with a pair of dual 12″ floor standers be hind my desk. Alternately The HD DVR computer pumps everything into our Yamaha Home Theater system bandying about 7 full range speakers and a sub capable of jiggling the neighbor girls barely existent boobs from a hundred feet away. We still have that old 36″ JVC but that is less important now that our pop culture fix is down loaded rather than tuned in for the most part.
What is your story? This is Lorelle’s
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Tags: Acquisition, eBay, Home Theater, laser, laser printing, law suits, Linux, operating system, Pop Culture, Ralf, ram
Doesn’t this just stir up all kinds of things that you had forgotten about?
My first PC was a kit that I made. Can’t remember what it was called, but I’ll never forget the horrid monochrome screen. But I made it all by myself. Ah, the old days.
I made a few of those for people. They got their computer kit with a mail order class for computer repair, which left me wondering why I was building it for them.
[...] Pop Culture Evolution (tags: Acquisition eBay Home Theater laser printing law suits Linux operating system Pop Culture Ralf ram) [...]
Thanks to the article, it make the life of a seo/link building easier and make the commenter come back again and again. I searched for a while to find the right answer to my questions!
Going back to the old ways is cool, certainly when it comes to listening to music!
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