Goodbye Computer
After eight years of faithful service, we are about to retire our computer. It has served us well and it could hobble along for a bit longer with memory upgrades, but it is as far from today’s PCs as a horse-drawn cart is from a Ferrari. I am tired of not being able to take part in the fun on the web: videos, music, real-time multi-player games. It is time to join the digital revolution proper: I feel old and out of touch, just like this wretched machine. And I can no longer abide this beta-version of AbiWord I am forced to use: there are bugs in it which occasionally overwrite text instead of inserting it (fun if you insert a paragraph in a story without backup) and (I’m not kidding!) sometimes causes me to write backwards which I’m sure is hilarious if anyone could see my face, but less funny if you’re writing down an idea that is about to go *puff*.
John once spent several weeks programming his dad’s old Amstrad to put out text backwards. Oh, the good old days when people still tinkered with their computers…
That’s another thing: I love Linux, but I am not a power user. I do not enjoy leafing through thick tomes of system admin manuals to get my stuff to work. There are Linux distributions for desktops aimed at lusers like myself, but I have tinkered with a few of them on our mate’s machine and have not managed to install some bits of software I wanted to try (and neither did he, but he isn’t interested in the user end: he loves to tinker with code and tweak the kernel, that sort of thing). So I can’t have a PC running Linux—it just isn’t me. John is now a Windows drone (he has to cram for Microshit Software Developer exams, no less!) and he doesn’t use this machine much any more.
“Buy a computer for yourself,” he said.
So it has to be a Mackintosh. Geeks are in love with the sleek, mean OS10. It is made for people like me, but it is still UNIX! Problem: there are almost too many bells and whistles attached. Will it go down the Microshit path and become bloated out of all proportion? After all, they would want us to buy a new machine every 3 years, preferably sooner, won’t they? Could we install Linux on an Apple computer?
“Don’t be stupid,” John said: “OS 10 is UNIX!”
Er, yes—of course. Goes to show how much I know. But if I order an iMac I feel as if I am selling out. We still have our 1993 Performa and it works just fine (for retro-games and word processing). And what about the machine I’m currently typing this on? After a turbulent early relationship, it has learned to accept me. It now opens AbiWord unbidden in the right window even if I accidentally open it from another part of the desktop (this isn’t programmed in, this is the ghost in the machine!) it hasn’t thrown a strop, hidden its desktop icons or gone into a never-ending loop for months now. I feel like a traitor planning to mothball it. But I want fun and games, sleekness and speed. And knowing our attachment to the old Performa, we will end up keeping this machine and taking it with us wherever we go for the next twelve years. It could become one of the best-travelled desktops on the planet…
What about lab-tops?
They are fragile things. They get lost, they get stolen and when travelling they are a drag (literally—think ball on a chain). We are perhaps five years away from a phone/web integrated PDA with keyboard that weighs 200 g or less (mainly the keyboard) and connects via WiFi (i.e.in all the major population centres) for e-mail and blogging. If you travel across the desert/ocean/rainforest it will contently sit in your back pocket and you can pull it out anywhere to work offline (read or write that novel, listen to your music collection) or connect via satellite phone. I have no idea why this technology is so long in coming because it is basically all there, but I blame corruption, moronic licensing laws and the usual software cock-ups. It pays to wait. But that is what I said about getting a new PC for the past 3 years…
Tags: computers and gadgets, Tag Index
Denni