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Computers I have known
Tonight I'm working on migrating from my old laptop to the "new" one (actually it was a Christmas present a year ago, which indicates how much trouble I'm having prying myself out of the old one). Fleetwood MacBook was purchased in 2008 and is still a surprisingly functional little computer despite seeing heavy usage and being toted all over the country with me; it tends to overheat on video and graphics now, but it's still a great little writing machine and I expect I'll keep using it as a travel machine even now that I'm moving to a computer that can actually run InDesign and Photoshop at the same time without choking.
Fleetwood MacBook was never supposed to be my main computer at all, but ended up being drafted from my travel computer to my main/only one when my iMac suffered a sudden catastrophic death in approximately 2010. And it's computered up beautifully, I have to say. *pats it*
While I was copying stuff and trying to remember my passwords tonight, I started feeling nostalgic about Computers I Have Known and decided to write it all down for posterity.
My first experience with a computer was on an early '80s IBM PC which didn't have a hard drive, just a dual 5 1/4 floppy drive setup. It was ancient and outdated even when we got it in the early '90s, but we were super poor and a family friend gave us their old computer, so we weren't going to turn up our noses at it. We lived in Bush Alaska and were off the electrical grid, but like a lot of people in rural Alaska, we had a generator (gasoline powered) and would run it to use what electrical appliances we possessed, so my sister and I got to play on the computer when the generator was running. Despite that hurdle, we actually spent quite a bit of time on it, mostly taking turns writing on a simple DOS word processor called Galaxy, or playing Rogue, a dungeon-crawl game that's a sort of precursor to Nethack. You'd boot into DOS from a disk, then swap disks to load whatever programs you wanted into its very limited RAM and save your files to a disk. Or sometimes the generator would run out of gas and you'd just lose everything.
I got on the Internet (and all hope was lost) in 1995 when I went to the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I wouldn't have a computer of my own for a few years yet, but Orion -- my boyfriend, later husband -- had a Mac IIsi. (Yes, that's a 160 Mb hard drive -- not Gb -- and that's the high end!) The reason why I continue to buy Macs to this day is because my first experience with non-DOS computers was on his Mac in his dorm room back in 1995, so it's what I was comfortable with and what I chose to use when I bought a computer of my own. Ironically HE switched to Linux later and I've been the only Mac user in the house for a decade and a half.
The first computer I ever bought that was really, truly mine was the PowerBook I bought myself when I moved out of the dorms in 1998. I was so delighted and proud. MY OWN COMPUTER. Unfortunately, there was something genuinely wrong with it. It froze and crashed constantly. I had it for probably about 8 months before I finally got sick of it -- these days, I'd probably try to get it fixed under warranty, because it was brand new when I bought it, but wee!me either didn't know that was an option or didn't want to deal with it, because I decided to sell it. I did a complete backup of everything on the hard drive ...
... and the next day, in a bizarre combination of the world's worst and the world's best luck, it was stolen. A thief walked into our shared rental house in broad daylight and took the computer right off my desk, with two of the roommates upstairs. From the upstairs window, they saw him walk out after taking the laptop and a few other valuables belonging to other housemates. We filed a police report, but they never found the guy and I never saw that laptop again. I bitterly regretted losing whatever cash I would've gotten from selling it, but I still couldn't get over the fact that I'd backed up EVERYTHING -- my writing and email, mostly -- the previous night.
After that I was computerless. One of my co-workers gave me her old Mac Quadra, which was a definite step down from the PowerBook (it had Photoshop 2.5, if you can believe that such a thing existed, and it took like 20 minutes to launch), but at least I could get online and write a bit. ("Online" for me at the time, incidentally, involved using a free university dial-up account via a modem. The university had Ethernet in the dorms, but we were still a ways out from having any such thing generally available in town. I had by now moved out of the shared house and was living in a small apartment with a roommate, and we didn't consider it worth the money to pay for our own dial-up account, so I just used the university dial-up number even though I was technically no longer a student.)
In either late 1999 or early 2000, I bought a tangerine clamshell iBook. It was not only the first generation of iBooks but quite literally the very first iBook in Fairbanks, which I know because I already had mine on order, and this one came in first but the customer didn't pick it up, so the store asked if I wanted it. I had ordered a blue one, but jumped on the tangerine one with delight, and I was very happy with it. I used it for nearly a decade. The only problem was that both the power cord and the battery were prone to wearing out. I seem to recall that I ended up replacing the power adapter 3 times (both the place where it plugged into the computer and the connection between adapter & cord were prone to wearing out) and the battery at least once, possibly twice. It had a 3 Gb hard drive, which Orion helped me replace with a 20 Gb hard drive -- we never quite got it to go back together without bulging, and then we had to take it apart twice more because I spilled an entire cup of sweetened tea AND (in a different incident) a glass of wine on the keyboard/hard drive. Amazingly, it survived all of this, although the CD drive was always kind of ... sticky. Anyway, as hard as it is to believe now, it was my main working/graphics machine all through the first few years of the last decade. I did the typesetting/layout for the first Raven's Children graphic novel on it, and used it to color/letter at least half of Kismet: Hunter's Moon.
I bought a new computer in about 2003, an eMac that was monstrously heavy and bulky because it was an all-in-one computer with a CRT monitor rather than a flatscreen. This one had, I believe, either a 40 or a 60 Gb hard drive. I had enough space to do video now! (And I wasn't constantly having to delete things off my hard drive for lack of space. A lot of my early graphics stuff is backed up on old CDs somewhere, because I had to delete it off the iBook hard drive ...) This was when I first learned to make AMVs (anime music videos) on an absolutely ANCIENT copy of Adobe Premiere that I had *cough* acquired from the university's computer lab in probably 1998. (I actually used that copy of Premiere all the way up to the point that I made my first SGA vids in 2006, before switching to iMovie on my new iMac.) I didn't actually use the eMac all that extensively, because I was still relying pretty heavily on the clamshell for my writing/travel machine, but the eMac became obsolete for graphics very quickly.
So about 2006 I bought one of the flatscreen iMacs. These were notoriously prone to burning themselves out by overheating, because they didn't cool very efficiently, and consequently I was forever paranoid and vigilant about not letting it run too much or get too hot (ironically, as we'll see shortly). This was actually the lesser reason I bought Fleetwood MacBook in 2008, because I had been getting into vidding rather heavily and I wanted a computer I could make vids on without being paranoid that it was going to overheat. The other reason was just that I wanted a travel machine again. I had still been using the tangerine iBook right up to this point, believe it or not -- I got very nearly a decade of service out of that thing! But it didn't have wireless (technically it would have been possible to put a wireless card in it, but I'd never done so) and it was so fantastically ancient and slow that I wanted to reward myself with a shiny new laptop. A laptop with WIRELESS. (It was magical the first time I took Fleetwood MacBook traveling and could use wireless in airports. MAGIC, I TELL YOU.)
And then I was VERY glad that I had a fully functional, nearly new computer with all my software on it, because my iMac suddenly and catastrophically stopped working. So far -- knock on keyboard -- this is my only really devastating hardware failure. The best we can figure is that the hard drive controller died. It simply stopped being able to find its hard drive. The drive itself was still intact, so we hooked it up to Fleetwood and copied over all my files. And that's been my main computer ever since.
... and just now my file copy finished, so this is an excellent place to stop! So far, Fleetwood MacBook is the only one of my computers that I've named, and the only one since the tangerine iBook that I've been truly attached to. I should probably think of a name for the new computer; maybe it would help me feel more affectionate towards it, because it is a nice computer and all my Adobe apps run so very smoothly. But I will miss Fleetwood MacBook. It's been a good little friend.
Fleetwood MacBook was never supposed to be my main computer at all, but ended up being drafted from my travel computer to my main/only one when my iMac suffered a sudden catastrophic death in approximately 2010. And it's computered up beautifully, I have to say. *pats it*
While I was copying stuff and trying to remember my passwords tonight, I started feeling nostalgic about Computers I Have Known and decided to write it all down for posterity.
My first experience with a computer was on an early '80s IBM PC which didn't have a hard drive, just a dual 5 1/4 floppy drive setup. It was ancient and outdated even when we got it in the early '90s, but we were super poor and a family friend gave us their old computer, so we weren't going to turn up our noses at it. We lived in Bush Alaska and were off the electrical grid, but like a lot of people in rural Alaska, we had a generator (gasoline powered) and would run it to use what electrical appliances we possessed, so my sister and I got to play on the computer when the generator was running. Despite that hurdle, we actually spent quite a bit of time on it, mostly taking turns writing on a simple DOS word processor called Galaxy, or playing Rogue, a dungeon-crawl game that's a sort of precursor to Nethack. You'd boot into DOS from a disk, then swap disks to load whatever programs you wanted into its very limited RAM and save your files to a disk. Or sometimes the generator would run out of gas and you'd just lose everything.
I got on the Internet (and all hope was lost) in 1995 when I went to the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I wouldn't have a computer of my own for a few years yet, but Orion -- my boyfriend, later husband -- had a Mac IIsi. (Yes, that's a 160 Mb hard drive -- not Gb -- and that's the high end!) The reason why I continue to buy Macs to this day is because my first experience with non-DOS computers was on his Mac in his dorm room back in 1995, so it's what I was comfortable with and what I chose to use when I bought a computer of my own. Ironically HE switched to Linux later and I've been the only Mac user in the house for a decade and a half.
The first computer I ever bought that was really, truly mine was the PowerBook I bought myself when I moved out of the dorms in 1998. I was so delighted and proud. MY OWN COMPUTER. Unfortunately, there was something genuinely wrong with it. It froze and crashed constantly. I had it for probably about 8 months before I finally got sick of it -- these days, I'd probably try to get it fixed under warranty, because it was brand new when I bought it, but wee!me either didn't know that was an option or didn't want to deal with it, because I decided to sell it. I did a complete backup of everything on the hard drive ...
... and the next day, in a bizarre combination of the world's worst and the world's best luck, it was stolen. A thief walked into our shared rental house in broad daylight and took the computer right off my desk, with two of the roommates upstairs. From the upstairs window, they saw him walk out after taking the laptop and a few other valuables belonging to other housemates. We filed a police report, but they never found the guy and I never saw that laptop again. I bitterly regretted losing whatever cash I would've gotten from selling it, but I still couldn't get over the fact that I'd backed up EVERYTHING -- my writing and email, mostly -- the previous night.
After that I was computerless. One of my co-workers gave me her old Mac Quadra, which was a definite step down from the PowerBook (it had Photoshop 2.5, if you can believe that such a thing existed, and it took like 20 minutes to launch), but at least I could get online and write a bit. ("Online" for me at the time, incidentally, involved using a free university dial-up account via a modem. The university had Ethernet in the dorms, but we were still a ways out from having any such thing generally available in town. I had by now moved out of the shared house and was living in a small apartment with a roommate, and we didn't consider it worth the money to pay for our own dial-up account, so I just used the university dial-up number even though I was technically no longer a student.)
In either late 1999 or early 2000, I bought a tangerine clamshell iBook. It was not only the first generation of iBooks but quite literally the very first iBook in Fairbanks, which I know because I already had mine on order, and this one came in first but the customer didn't pick it up, so the store asked if I wanted it. I had ordered a blue one, but jumped on the tangerine one with delight, and I was very happy with it. I used it for nearly a decade. The only problem was that both the power cord and the battery were prone to wearing out. I seem to recall that I ended up replacing the power adapter 3 times (both the place where it plugged into the computer and the connection between adapter & cord were prone to wearing out) and the battery at least once, possibly twice. It had a 3 Gb hard drive, which Orion helped me replace with a 20 Gb hard drive -- we never quite got it to go back together without bulging, and then we had to take it apart twice more because I spilled an entire cup of sweetened tea AND (in a different incident) a glass of wine on the keyboard/hard drive. Amazingly, it survived all of this, although the CD drive was always kind of ... sticky. Anyway, as hard as it is to believe now, it was my main working/graphics machine all through the first few years of the last decade. I did the typesetting/layout for the first Raven's Children graphic novel on it, and used it to color/letter at least half of Kismet: Hunter's Moon.
I bought a new computer in about 2003, an eMac that was monstrously heavy and bulky because it was an all-in-one computer with a CRT monitor rather than a flatscreen. This one had, I believe, either a 40 or a 60 Gb hard drive. I had enough space to do video now! (And I wasn't constantly having to delete things off my hard drive for lack of space. A lot of my early graphics stuff is backed up on old CDs somewhere, because I had to delete it off the iBook hard drive ...) This was when I first learned to make AMVs (anime music videos) on an absolutely ANCIENT copy of Adobe Premiere that I had *cough* acquired from the university's computer lab in probably 1998. (I actually used that copy of Premiere all the way up to the point that I made my first SGA vids in 2006, before switching to iMovie on my new iMac.) I didn't actually use the eMac all that extensively, because I was still relying pretty heavily on the clamshell for my writing/travel machine, but the eMac became obsolete for graphics very quickly.
So about 2006 I bought one of the flatscreen iMacs. These were notoriously prone to burning themselves out by overheating, because they didn't cool very efficiently, and consequently I was forever paranoid and vigilant about not letting it run too much or get too hot (ironically, as we'll see shortly). This was actually the lesser reason I bought Fleetwood MacBook in 2008, because I had been getting into vidding rather heavily and I wanted a computer I could make vids on without being paranoid that it was going to overheat. The other reason was just that I wanted a travel machine again. I had still been using the tangerine iBook right up to this point, believe it or not -- I got very nearly a decade of service out of that thing! But it didn't have wireless (technically it would have been possible to put a wireless card in it, but I'd never done so) and it was so fantastically ancient and slow that I wanted to reward myself with a shiny new laptop. A laptop with WIRELESS. (It was magical the first time I took Fleetwood MacBook traveling and could use wireless in airports. MAGIC, I TELL YOU.)
And then I was VERY glad that I had a fully functional, nearly new computer with all my software on it, because my iMac suddenly and catastrophically stopped working. So far -- knock on keyboard -- this is my only really devastating hardware failure. The best we can figure is that the hard drive controller died. It simply stopped being able to find its hard drive. The drive itself was still intact, so we hooked it up to Fleetwood and copied over all my files. And that's been my main computer ever since.
... and just now my file copy finished, so this is an excellent place to stop! So far, Fleetwood MacBook is the only one of my computers that I've named, and the only one since the tangerine iBook that I've been truly attached to. I should probably think of a name for the new computer; maybe it would help me feel more affectionate towards it, because it is a nice computer and all my Adobe apps run so very smoothly. But I will miss Fleetwood MacBook. It's been a good little friend.
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