Previous entry I related the effects that the passing presidential administrations had on my life. In this entry I want to talk about another chain of succession that had an even greater impact on my lifestyle: personal computers.
Recently I managed to blow the motherboard (MOBO as the cool kids say) of my tablet PC. The fix involved dragging out the beyboard and ordering a new computer bottom off ebay.
If you will remember my friend who had the OLPC, she was so impressed by the beyboard, that she made a bunch as Xmas presents for her father and brothers. Of course she emphasized that it was called a "beyboard." Now that it’s receiving some of the acclaim it deserves, I’ll have to start cracking on the second generation beyboard I’ve been thinking about.
But while I was using my backup computer, a Dell Inspiron 7000, Windows 98 machine, I thought that I might was well get my other broken MOBO laptop working. This was a Dell Inspiron 1150, Windows XP machine that has managed to blow out the IDE bus on two different MOBOs. This model has such a notoriously crappy MOBO, that the Canadian government decided to sue Dell. Working motherboards for the 1150 are so hard to find that they cost about as much as the entire machine. That’s why it took me years to put the money down for repair parts. Why throw good money after bad, when I could get a kick-ass tablet?
All this laptop drama put me in a nostalgic mood about all the computers that have come and gone through my life. A nostalgia heightened by a trip to the Goodwill Computerworks store and the attached Computer Museum.
I think this is most awesome museum in Austin. The Blanton can kiss my ass.
Here’s an Asteroid tabletop machine that may have been hand-fabricated.
Here’s a Cray supercomputer:
If you look closely at its stats, you will notice that it’s slightly less powerful than my TabletPC.
The story I heard, is that the computer museum started out as something of a joke. The guy who ran the computer department of Goodwill just started collecting the crappy pieces of donated computers that were too old and low-powered to have resale value, and rather than just throw them away, put them on display.
And then Michael Dell gave the "museum" a big donation, money drawn from all those corners he cut on the Inspiron 1150, and the next thing you know, there’s volunteers, pretty stands, free cookies, and those laminated fact signs you see in real musuems.
Personally I was thrilled to see some models that I used to use.
The Kaypro and the Osbourne were two "portable" computers that my family got as hand-me-downs from my Grandfather. They were portable because the keyboard locked onto the case and they had a handle on the backside. About the size and weight of a commercial microwave.
With the Kaypro I used to play this game "Ladders" that was kinda like DonkeyKong, but it was entirely text-based. Your player image was a ‘P’ ascii character and you had to jump all the rolling lower-case ‘o’s. It totally rocked. The Kaypro was the primary feature of my ‘office,’ a basement closet underneath the stairs. I would write absolutely horrible sci-fi stories in WordStar. I am so glad that those 5.25" diskettes have all degraded.
It was about the Osbourne that my grandfather told me if he ever caught me writing on the floppy disks with a ballpoint pen he would disown me. Nope, never pushed him on that rule.
Although they didn’t have the exact model of TRS-80 that I used to play "Space Assault" and "Megabug", they had an entire wall of the "Trash-Eighties."
So, yeah, stop by if you have the chance. It’s up near the Walmart on 183, and you’ve never seen museum docents so talkative and excited about anachronistic data-crunching.
At this point there’s a break in the narrative for a brief salute to the custom-built 486 that took me through college. Not sure what happened to it. I mainly used it for playing Doom and X-wing Simulator. Yup, Doom is responsible for most of the missed opportunities in my life.
Now, here’s some glamour shots of the four working laptops I now have sitting around.
The little Texas Instruments in the back there, it’s really on its last legs.
Essentially nothing works anymore. None of the ports, even the printer ports. The 3.5" diskette drive only works sometimes. But it turns on, which is pretty good for a twelve-year-old laptop. I wrote 2.5 books on this machine and it’s covered in nostalgic stickers from various Madison coffeshops from the late 20th century.
The laptop on the far left here, is the Inspiron 7000, the one that a girlfriend gave me in the early part of the 21st century.
I lent it back to her for a while as I used the Inspiron 1150. She loaded it with a game called "Marble Madness." During my recent stint with it, I completely failed to break any of her high scores.
Here’s the four laptops kissing.
So, I’m going to divest myself of some of these computers. The Texas Instruments is definitely going to get dropped in a donation/recycling box somewhere. I’m still fond of the Inspiron 7000, if only because it does everything that’s important and absolutely nothing else. While I was using that, I was surprisingly productive. I wrote an entire screenplay in about two days. It’s all the magic of not having access to the internet.
