It's no doubt shocking to those who know me that I haven't mentioned computers as of yet. Well, I guess I'll have to do something about that.
Might as well begin at the beginning. My family acquired a Commodore 64 back in 1984, which would make me seven years old. We didn't have a floppy drive for the first couple of years, so computer activities were limited to two of cartridge-based games, or typing in programs by hand with no ability to save them. A floppy drive came in time, as did connecting with other C64 owners in school. I even dabbled in doing "useful" things-- as recently as my senior year of high school (1995), I typed papers on my C64-- using the excellent GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System). Excellent, you ask? Sure. Bringing a functioning graphical user interface and a full suite of productivity applications to a 1 MHz computer with 64K of memory was no mean feat.
Long about 1990, I took a big heap of savings ($600) and bought myself an Amiga 500. The Amiga line had offered great graphics, sound, full preemptive multitasking "and so much more" since 1985. It was so far ahead of everyone else that it was just stupid, so naturally the machine was put out by Commodore-- a company which refused to throw away perfectly good money on advertising. Though the Amiga gained a lot of traction in Europe, Commodore went out of business in '94. Sigh. I took my trusty A500 with me to college, and showed off its capabilities. Not in terms of what it could do, as that was no longer remarkable, but rather that it did so with so little. Fellow geeks used to Macs and PCs were baffled. "What do you mean you can multitask with a 7 MHz CPU and half a meg of RAM?" Those were the days...
Along the way, I spent a lot of time using Macs and more modern Amigas, and less time with Sun, SGI, and DEC systems. I even divined how to use RIT's VAX cluster, though I hear they're trying to phase it out these days.
Eventually, though, I fell into the clutches of the Windows camp. By my best count, I have built some twelve Windows PCs in the last five years-- six for me, and six for other people. Six systems of my own in five years, you ask? Yes, but it's not what you think. The first four were built in the first 15 months or so-- almost entirely from parts that other people didn't want any more. It was joked that my personal computers were following some variant of Moore's Law. The fifth system (which I'm typing this on) was all new components, thus I had gone from 50 MHz to 550 MHz in a shade under a year and a half.
The sixth is my pride and joy, the mighty Cerberus-- a dual 1.33 GHz (overclocked from 1.0) AMD Morgan Duron box, running Windows 2000 Pro, that I built 15 months ago. I use it for participating in the Folding@Home distributed computing effort, which aims to model how proteins fold-- both correctly and incorrectly. In theory, this will improve our understanding of many diseases. Cerberus is also my gaming rig-- usually at the same time proteins are being crunched (two CPUs are better than one, in my estimation).
So, that's the general overview of where I am, and how I got there-- on the geography of the desktop computing world. Apologies to the computer intolerant.
Posted by Mitch at December 11, 2003 03:55 PMHah. Me waaay older than you: I soldered the slots into the backplane of an Altair 8080 when I was a senior in College.
I had an Amiga 1000, later upgraded to a 2000. Great machine that was waaaay ahead of its time. It's main problem was that the earlier versions of the chips it used didn't have an MMU, which would have made memory management a lot easier. (Remember the easter egg in the Preferences menu, where you needed two people to hold down the keys while ejecting the floppy disk ("Amiga. Always a Champion."), and re-inserting it? ("We made the Amiga, but They F*d it up."))
I had a machine with dual 450 MHZ PIIs that first hosted the War College. My main machine then was a dual 1.13 GHZ PIII system. After a mobo blowout, I got a dual Athlon MP board (1 CPU so far, though) for my main machine, and rebuilt the old dual machine with a new Mobo using the PIII chips. The Dual 450 is a backup now.
Posted by: Ptah at December 11, 2003 04:18 PM