a eulogy

a little over a decade ago (august 1994, but who's counting?), i bought my first computer. it was a compaq, with a whopping 4mb RAM, 33mhz and i believe a 250mb harddrive. that was a pretty big deal, not top of the line, but not really to far from it at the time. all this for the price of ~$1400.

i arrived on campus to pick up my PC (bought it thru the school) and there was some sort of mix up so i didn't get it right away. i did get my 14" monitor, but what good was a monitor w/o a PC? so finally, i get it and realize pretty quickly that was i had wasn't what i had ordered. what was sold to me wasn't a 33mhz, but 66mhz. i actually ended up better off (one of the few times that's happened to me) and it even had a larger hard drive (a whopping 340mb - i still have it, and go figure - it still works!). windows 3.1, dos 6.22. it also had a not so fast 2400 baud modem, but at least it worked and i was able to play with email, gopher, etc.

i played Doom on it with the whopping 4Mb RAM (had to tweak the autoexec, multi-boot stuff, etc, worked better when i got an additional 4Mb RAM). i even had to get the motherboard replaced because the video card (on the motherboard) started having issues. Compaq sent someone to my dorm room and i got my first good look at the interior of the PC (i hadn't cracked the case, something i do regularly these days)

many papers, many emails, several upgrades (more memory, and a 1.2Gb drive) and eventually, Windows 95 (including Win95 beta).

it served me well, for quite a while and even after i moved onto newer PCs, i still found a way to use it from time to time. farewell old friend.