Computers I've owned
Mar. 30th, 2006 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienAnswering ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
rilina's question:
1989-1993: Amstrad PCW 8256; basically a word processor with faint ambitions to be a computer, running off 3" floppy disks that weren't compatible with anything else in the known universe. I bought it a few months after I started work; I could just barely carry the box home. It took about twenty minutes to do a search-and-replace on a 30Kb file, and the biggest file it could possibly handle was 90K -- which is how I got the habit of writing short chapters, one per file. I wrote about 200K words of fiction on that thing, and a lot of letters, and did a little bit of BASIC programming for fun. It caused a lot of electrical noise, which interfered with my landlady's radio listening if I used it in the mornings.
1993-1997: Packard Bell 25MHz 386 desktop, with twin floppies and 110Mb hard drive. I bought it because I wanted compatibility with the machines at work, so I could e-mail my stories to friends. No modem, no CD-ROM, 8-bit colour, but capable enough to let me bring bits of work home on floppies. It didn't get a lot of use after I moved to London in 1995, started working on Sun machines and put it in what turned out to be the coldest corner of the flat. I sold it to an elderly friend before I left London; I don't know what happened to it after he died a couple of years later, but I think he enjoyed it.
1997-2000: Texas Instruments/Acer Pentium laptop, 120MHz Pentium, 1Gb hard drive upgraded to 1.4Gb when it failed after six months. This was the machine I brought to the US, and subsequently hooked up to the internet with a PC-card modem; it opened up new worlds (Myst!) to me, but aged quickly. I eventually sold it to my mother, who used it for email and light word-processing until last summer; last I heard it still boots, but it's fragile and flaky these days, and she has a nice new HP laptop called Algernon.
2000-2006: 700MHz Dell desktop with Windows 98, CD-RW and DVD. This was another new world; I scanned photos, I burned CDs, I websurfed; I played games; I watched movies. Now with a church friend who needed Office.
2000-????: 650MHz Acer TravelMate laptop, bought for work purposes and because a desktop just wasn't enough, mostly superseded in 2004, but it's had a few outings since then. (I mention it occasionally as Old Laptop). It was one of the first laptop models with a CD-burner and no floppy, and I bought it a wireless card at the Fry's in Palo Alto.
2004-????: 2.8GHz Sony Vaio K Series, otherwise known as Behemoth and Real Laptop. Weighs a ton, which is why it's now essentially a desktop, plugged into a USB hub with an external keyboard and mouse. Hard drive replaced under warranty last September, after it failed while I was in Sheffield in August and I had to borrow my mother's Algernon for the last couple of weeks of my working visit.
Also there's Butterfly, my official work laptop, new in 2006, but I don't own that.
rilina's question:1989-1993: Amstrad PCW 8256; basically a word processor with faint ambitions to be a computer, running off 3" floppy disks that weren't compatible with anything else in the known universe. I bought it a few months after I started work; I could just barely carry the box home. It took about twenty minutes to do a search-and-replace on a 30Kb file, and the biggest file it could possibly handle was 90K -- which is how I got the habit of writing short chapters, one per file. I wrote about 200K words of fiction on that thing, and a lot of letters, and did a little bit of BASIC programming for fun. It caused a lot of electrical noise, which interfered with my landlady's radio listening if I used it in the mornings.
1993-1997: Packard Bell 25MHz 386 desktop, with twin floppies and 110Mb hard drive. I bought it because I wanted compatibility with the machines at work, so I could e-mail my stories to friends. No modem, no CD-ROM, 8-bit colour, but capable enough to let me bring bits of work home on floppies. It didn't get a lot of use after I moved to London in 1995, started working on Sun machines and put it in what turned out to be the coldest corner of the flat. I sold it to an elderly friend before I left London; I don't know what happened to it after he died a couple of years later, but I think he enjoyed it.
1997-2000: Texas Instruments/Acer Pentium laptop, 120MHz Pentium, 1Gb hard drive upgraded to 1.4Gb when it failed after six months. This was the machine I brought to the US, and subsequently hooked up to the internet with a PC-card modem; it opened up new worlds (Myst!) to me, but aged quickly. I eventually sold it to my mother, who used it for email and light word-processing until last summer; last I heard it still boots, but it's fragile and flaky these days, and she has a nice new HP laptop called Algernon.
2000-2006: 700MHz Dell desktop with Windows 98, CD-RW and DVD. This was another new world; I scanned photos, I burned CDs, I websurfed; I played games; I watched movies. Now with a church friend who needed Office.
2000-????: 650MHz Acer TravelMate laptop, bought for work purposes and because a desktop just wasn't enough, mostly superseded in 2004, but it's had a few outings since then. (I mention it occasionally as Old Laptop). It was one of the first laptop models with a CD-burner and no floppy, and I bought it a wireless card at the Fry's in Palo Alto.
2004-????: 2.8GHz Sony Vaio K Series, otherwise known as Behemoth and Real Laptop. Weighs a ton, which is why it's now essentially a desktop, plugged into a USB hub with an external keyboard and mouse. Hard drive replaced under warranty last September, after it failed while I was in Sheffield in August and I had to borrow my mother's Algernon for the last couple of weeks of my working visit.
Also there's Butterfly, my official work laptop, new in 2006, but I don't own that.
