Résumé

Whether he likes it or not, Greg Story has created a web meme

Without further ado, I present my résumé of computers.

IBM XT: 1995 – 1996

This was the first computer I ever owned. It was given to me by a friend of the family. It had the 4.7MHz Intel 8088, 512k of RAM onboard, with another 128k of RAM on the printer card, bringing the total to a whopping 640k of RAM. It had a Hercules graphics card, powering an amber monitor, that gave a then-awesome 720×348 resolution. It had a 20MB hard drive which ran MS-DOS 5. I didn’t know how to use DOS, having only ever used Apple IIs and Macintoshes up to that point, but it didn’t matter; I had a computer that was all mine and that’s all that mattered. I learned QBasic and, with the help of several books with line-by-line game examples, I made several rudimentary text games in the vein of Infocom. This computer, thanks to its screaming 2400-baud modem and the help of a local newsprint magazine called Computer Shopper (which had a list of local BBSes in the back), also allowed me to connect to the numerous Seattle BBSes. Among these were Rat City and its two spinoffs, Coolman’s Hell and Q². All three ran on Renegade, and through those boards I met a good chunk of some of my oldest friends. (I even recently lived for a year and a half with the sysop of Rat City.) There were also a few boards I dialed frequently, like Masterpiece and Pacific Horizons, where many of my existing friends were. And for those who are curious, my dialing software of choice was Terminate. I have a lot of fond memories of that old XT…

Custom-built 486 PC: 1996 – 1996

For a brief period, I had a 486 which ran on a custom hex-edited copy of MS-DOS 6, which we affectionately called “Jewnix”. It had a pretty useless UI, really; we edited all the error and other messages to be completely useless, funny, offensive, and otherwise unrelated messages. You’ll just have to take my word for it: it was really funny. I ended up having to give it back to its original owner when he moved back to the United States from Poland. I think there’s still a copy of Jewnix floating around somewhere…

(Disclaimer: No, I’m not an anti-semetic. In fact it was not named by me at all.)

Custom-built AMD K6 266MHz: 1998 – 1999

This was the first computer I ever bought with my own money. For a couple of years, I had used my parent’s computers for writing music with Impulse Tracker, and so when I moved out on my own, I wanted to build my own Impulse Tracker box. I think I spent a grand total of roughly $200 on it, and it ran the then-newly-released Windows 98. It got a lot of use, and I wrote a lot of music on that machine. In 1999 it was stolen, but the roommate of the thief managed to copy all of my music off of it, so thanks to him much of my oldest stuff still exists.

Grape Rev. D iMac: 2000 – 2001

After years and years of lusting, I finally got my own Mac! An acquaintance of mine was filing for bankruptcy and knew of my love for Macs. Rather than let his iMac be repossessed, he gifted it to me. I loved that computer. It came with Mac OS 8.5 preinstalled, but I quickly went out and purchased Mac OS 9 so that I could use all of the nifty advanced features which weren’t available in OS 8.5. (My personal favourite, which I wish Apple would bring back in Mac OS X, was the ability to log in to your user account using a voice password.) I signed up for the free iTools account, which I still have. (Of course it’s a .Mac account now…) In February of that year, I bumped up its RAM to 192MB, so I could install Mac OS X 10.0, which I bought when it came out on 24 March, 2001. On the day I moved to *shudder* Utah, the person who originally gave me the iMac broke into my apartment while I was delivering a load to the moving truck and stole it. However, I had removed the hard drive shortly before then, so the beginnings of my comic book script (which I’d begun writing on that computer) was safe.

Sony VAIO Pentium-2 266MHz: 2001 – 2002

Depressed at the loss of my Mac, stuck in Utah, and without a computer, a friend of mine from Boise offered to sell me a used Sony VAIO for $100, which I promptly did. It was a beast of a machine, but I got a lot of use out of it. Nostalgic for Mac OS X, I installed various user interface tweaks to make Windows look as Mac-like as I could at the time. Well, at least, that’s what I did to Windows 2000—I dual-booted Windows 2000 and Windows 98 on it. With this machine I continued to work on my comic script, but had to write “in the dark” as I couldn’t remember what I’d previously written well enough to be able to reproduce it, and without access to a Mac I was unable to retrieve any information off of my iMac’s hard drive. Despite all of this, though, I made the best of what I could. I used this computer to create my first website, which was a table-ridden monstrosity. I’ve still got the site backed up, but nobody will ever see it, ever again.

Custom-built AMD K6-2 550MHz: 2002 – 2006

After I moved back to Seattle, my roommate at the time gave me his old motherboard and processor, which I used to upgrade my VAIO. I actually still have this computer, however I haven’t turned it on in roughly a year and a half, and even then it was only briefly so that I could test a warm gun in IE6/Win. When my PowerMac G3 died in 2004 (due to a faulty 1GHz G4 chip which Sonnet still won’t own up to) I was forced to use it once again as my main computer for two months while I saved up to buy my iMac G4. Now, however, the computer sits, unused, not even plugged in. The only reason I keep it around is for the data on its hard drive. I’m going to be giving the machine itself away before I move up to Vancouver this August.

Macintosh Performa 6115CD: 2002 – 2003

I was helping my brother move out of his house, and when my sister-in-law came across this computer in their garage, she offered it and an accompanying Apple monitor to me, since she knew I didn’t have a Mac. I happily accepted it, giddy at the thought of owning a Mac again. It wasn’t one I could use to retrieve the contents of my old iMac’s hard drive, and it only ran System 7.5.5 (which I downloaded from Apple’s FTP site on my Windows machine and dutifully transferred to floppy disks), but I always had a fondness for the pizza-box Macs. (And after all, it was a Mac!) This was the beginning of the slow decommissioning of my Windows computer, as I began to use it for all the things it was able to do in lieu of my PC. Also, after getting the Performa, my friend Mo gave me boxed copies of the first two Marathon games, which I’d wanted to play since high school but was never able to due to not having both a Mac and a copy of the game at the same time until this point. I do so love the Marathon series.

Beige PowerMac G3 266MHz: 2003 – 2004

Ah, the PowerMac G3. After I’d moved into a new house and bought my first car, I saved up a quick $300 + shipping and bought this computer off of eBay. Finally, I had a modern Mac again! When it arrived in the post, the very first thing I did was swap the hard drive in it with my old iMac’s hard drive. Being used to Windows by this point, I expected it to be a hassle to get the OS up and running, but the hard drive acted as though it had never been in any computer other than that PowerMac G3. There was an incredible feeling of being “whole” again when I was able to reunite my comic script, as well as retrieve all of my old files from two years before. I bought a used copy of Mac OS X 10.2 off of eBay and installed that, and that clinched it: I was back to being a Mac user, with the PowerMac G3 now my primary computer. I also maxed out its RAM to 768 MB, bought an XLR8 G4 400MHz chip to put into it, a USB/FireWire PCI card, and a PCI ATI Radeon 7000 with 64 MB of video RAM. The Radeon was originally a PC Radeon, but I re-flashed the ROM on it with the ROM from a Mac Radeon. This computer met its untimely death when, after spending $500 on a defective 1GHz G4 chip from Sonnet, the motherboard got fried. I tried to get a refund or replacement, but Sonnet wouldn’t budge. Because of that, I’ve sworn to never buy another Sonnet product so long as I live. Fuck them.

Macintosh Colour Classic: 2003 – present

Ever since it first came out in 1993, I’d wanted one. Of course, when they first came out, the 16MHz all-in-one computers cost $1,400. While shopping online for a Mac in 2003, I naturally looked into getting one, however I quickly realised that it wasn’t powerful enough to be a primary computer in this day and age, given the types of things for which I use computers. I then started looking into upgrades for the old Colour Classic, and stumbled across the Power Colour Classic. After I bought my PowerMac G3, I decided I was going to build my own Power Colour Classic… using my PowerMac for its innards. I even bought three 8.5-inch SVGA LCDs off of eBay for use in the Colour Classic. I still have the Colour Classic and the LCDs, and still intend on performing this mod, although I now plan on using a Mac Mini instead of a PowerMac G3 on the inside. Obviously, it’s going to be an expensive project, and that’s the only reason I haven’t finished it yet.

15-inch iMac G4 800MHz: 2004 – 2007

When the PowerMac G3 died, I was forced to use the VAIO for a couple months while I saved up money for a new Mac. I knew I wanted something with a G4 in it, and ever since the iMac G4 came out, I not-so-secretly lusted for one. After two months of saving up, I found a good deal on this iMac (the version with the Superdrive) for around $800, which was, at the time, the lowest price I could find anywhere on the internet. This machine has been a workhorse, and has handled everything I’ve thrown at it like a champ. It’s still my primary computer, and I’ve done many things with it over these past two years, including making this web site. It’s run Mac OS X 10.3, and currently runs Mac OS X 10.4, and always has Mac OS 9 installed, which I occasionally boot into for some older games. Buying this computer put the final nail in the coffin for my home Windows use, and I’ve never looked back. When I have money, I plan on getting Daystar’s 1.35GHz upgrade installed, and while they’re at it, I’ll have them put in a 250GB hard drive and upgrade the internal RAM stick to 512 MB to max out the RAM at 1 GB. I don’t plan on getting rid of this machine in the interest of backwards-compatibility, since there will always be holdout PowerPC and Mac OS 9 apps which I still run. Plus, it’s just damned sexy. I do so love this machine.

12-inch iBook G3 900MHz: 2005 – 2006

Around the middle of 2005 I decided that the time had finally come for me to get a laptop. I’d set a budget of $450, and with that I was able to find my beloved iBook. It’s slow, despite having a faster clock speed than my iMac. (With this machine, you can really tell the difference between a G3 and G4 chip.) It only has 256 MB of RAM, which I’d like to eventually upgrade to 640 MB, but I haven’t been too worried. I got the iBook primarily for writing, Internet use, and other minor tasks as a satellite to my iMac, and it performs them quite sufficiently, which is all I really need.

[Editor’s note — The following is an update added when I migrated this content to WordPress, to reflect the iBook G3 dying and my subsequent purchase of an iBook G4.]

In late 2006, the logic board failed. I took it to the Apple Store and got the logic board replaced, but when the iBook came back, I found they put a bad drive in. It was a combo drive, but it wouldn’t read any DVD media at all. It would read CD media just fine, but not DVDs. So I took that back in and got it replaced. Since I’d bought a new iBook G4, I gave it to a friend who has never had a Mac before.

14-inch iBook G4 1.07GHz: 2006 – present

When the iBook G3 died, I started going slowly insane as the weeks went by and I didn’t have a notebook. So I looked around on eBay and managed to snag this bad boy for $550. I bought a 1GB stick of RAM for it, and it’s now the fastest machine I’ve ever owned. In fact, it’s now my primary computer, with the iMac G4 being used as a kiosk and for burning DVDs. I intend to get a dual-layer 8x Superdrive for it, just so that I can burn DVDs on my main machine and in an amount of time that isn’t measured in geologic ages.

[Editor’s note — This is a bit of a living document, so I will make updates to it as required.]

20-inch iMac Core2Duo 2GHz: 2007 – present

In late 2007, the internal hard drive on my trusty iMac G4 finally gave up the ghost. Since I was getting ready for school at the time, I felt I needed not just a new desktop computer, but one which could both run the then-soon-to-be-released Leopard and serve as a video-editing machine for schoolwork. Initially, I was looking at a lower-priced iMac G5, scouring eBay for the cheapest find I could. The deal I ended up making on this machine was one I couldn’t pass up: a 20-inch 2GHz Core2Duo with 1.5GB of RAM that had only been used for 3 months and still had two and a half years left on its AppleCare, all in the box with its original materials. This new iMac has since become my main computer, with the iBook G4 becoming more or less a “dumb terminal” from which I remote into the iMac over Back To My Mac.