Not counting the side-projects and toy computer purchases, the time line
of my computer usage is fairly simple:
PET
->
C64
->
ProLinea
->
Borg
-> ALR
6×6 ->
G4
->
G5
->
MacBook
Commodore PET
My first exposure to the world of computation happened probably at the
age of 6. My mother worked at a dispatch center at
Fort
Meade in Maryland, and at times she would have to work on weekends
and thus drag me along with her. Although these excursions were
completely boring, I managed to occupy myself with banging on the
keyboard of one of the Commodore PETs located in the office. I’m pretty
sure that it was a PET because the unique design still sticks in my
head. While the computer was NEVER turned on, the seeds of computation
were sown into my brain.
Commodore 64
My first (and most used) computer was the classic Commodore 64 computer.
I was the first kid on my block to have a computer and was for a time
the most popular… until the girls across the street got a go cart.
Undeterred, I tore through the Programmer’s Reference Guide it seemed a
dozen times. I had all kinds of smiling sprite faces bouncing to and fro
and all over the damn place. It was a blast. I owned that computer for
10 years, and did everything imaginable on it. Some of the products of
my experience include: Baseball statistics trackers and calculators,
hundreds of cracked games, a dozen 20+ level
Gold
Box characters, D&D NPC/PC generators, and finally my
college application
essay. To this day I will occassionally fire up the
VICE emulator to
try and relive some of the magic.
Compaq ProLinea 486 SX/25 + Cyrix 686
My first PeeCee was the immor(t)al Compaq ProLinea. There were a number
of interesting firsts for me; namely first Linux install, huge RAM, and
huge hard drive space. This was my high school graduation present and
lasted through my first 3 years of college. However, the guts of the
system were ripped out and replaced with a
Cyrix
686 based system. There is not much to say about this computer
except that it afforded me my first attempt at installing Linux. I
vividly remember downloading the entire A set of
Slackware
floppy disks with my 2400 baud modem. It was painful to say the least.
However, after an enormous floppy juggling effort, I had a base install
of Slackware installed on a 20MB partition. The Frankenstein project
that this computer eventually became died of overheating one summer at
school and the remaining salvageable parts were donated to the
Charles
Sutton Painted Shoes Computer Fund.
The Borg Machine
The Borg machine was essentially a dual Pentium 3 1Ghz Asus motherboard
jammed into the big black cube case sold by
ServerCase. I
loved this machine. I had it running
multiple
flavors
of
*nix
on various partitions with a smear of Windows 2000 thrown in for good
measure. It had RAID 0 to start until a drive failure blew up my
installs, after which RAID 1 was the way to go. Did I mention that I
loved that machine? To this day I am not sure why I got rid of it.
ALR 6×6
Oh yeah… I got rid of the Borg Machine because I got a wild hair about
the ALR
6×6 machine. While living in DC I came across someone wanting to
trade their busted server for a functional machine. Since the Borg
machine’s brain was getting a bit old, I decided to remove one of the
hard drives, and trade it straight up. One may think it unwise to trade
a functional machine, semi-modern, machine for one that relies on the
Pentium Pro processor, but that simplistic view did not describe the
allure of the 6×6. In a nutshell picture this: LCD access panel, 6-way
symmetric processors, power requirements out the wazoo. The motherboard
was a huge piece of real estate that took 6 Pentium Pro processors,
which at that time were available for peanuts. My rent at the time
included electrical costs, so I couldn’t resist making the trade.
Luckily for me, the machine was salvageable and needed only an obscure
voltage
regulator module in order to work. However, the road to making that
discovery was long, winding, educational, and at times tedious. I used
that machine for a solid 6 months before giving it up as more trouble
than it was worth, but for a while there it was a blast.
PowerMac G4
I had been
playing
with
older
Macs
purchased through my company and/or Ebay for a while before finally
taking the plunge and buying a brand new (err… refurbished) G4. This
shiney piece of eye candy was a pretty sweet ride (dual 500Mhz G4 CPUs
plus 1GB RAM), and gave me my first true departure from the
x86
architecture since the C64 days.
PowerMac G5
