Time for a new post. This post has nothing to do with my life in a big way. It's just a rumination on what I plan to do the next time I buy a computer.
OK, here we go. Over the last 21 years, I've always had a computer. When I finished by PhD and went to work at a crappy company, I figured it was time to indulge and buy a computer. I thought about it a lot but my wife (new wife at the time) didn't seem too hot on the idea. She worked as an x-ray crystallographer at another big crappy company and looked at a computer screen all day and didn't seem too interested in looking at one when she got home. Eventually she even had a VT-100 terminal (a real one, not an emulator) hooked up to a 300 baud modem so she could work from home. Besides personal computers costs a lot of money back then. Around that time the Mac came out and I was enthralled. I played with them a few times and I was hooked. But she said no.
Imagine my surprise when some friends were visiting from our old school and lo and behold, delivered an original 128K Mac for my very own. It was an anniversity gift from my wife purchased at the academic discount by our friends. ($1300 vs. $3000). Happy! Happy!
Unfortuantely, reality soon set in. It was a cool computer but it was next to impossible to program if you weren't gonna do it for a living. I wanted something like Turbo Pascal for the mac. And I wanted it free. Unfortunately, we'd already spent the money budgeted for home computers for the next seven years.
Over time, I acquired some software and did a little programming and played with my Mac as I watched it slowly but surely become almost useless. Still played games and things but it was becoming uber underpowered quickly.
After seven years, my wife had changed jobs and was working for a University as a crystallographer and I was getting sicker of my company all the time. So I started looking for a new job in a new place. When I found a new job in a new place, I convinced my lovely wife that seven years was enough time and that when we moved we wouldn't have that lucrative academic discount so now was time for a new computer. We got a IIsi with a 13 inch color monitor. I know that 13 inch sounds really bad, but that was one nice looking monitor and Apple tended to call a monitor by it's viewable size whereas the PC world called a monitor by the size of the truck used to ship it.
After seven years, it was still doing OK but some apps were a bit slow and the internet was starting to come on board. The real kicker happened when I upgraded our copy of Office to the newest version and it took 50 seconds just to load Excel. My wife used Excel to do the budget and that was intolerable. Of course, that was my plan all along.
Our timing was actually pretty good. I'd been eyeing a new mac for a long time and couldn't figure out what to buy. We finally decided to take the plunge just after the 233-G3 had come out. This was a good thing. The G3 was probably the biggest speed jump in the Mac line and by waiting, we got a computer that has served us admirably for the last seven years and still seems to be running strong. But there are a few things that are starting to break. A few years ago I tried OS X on a G3 and it's a non starter, so we can't take advantage of any of that iStuff. The old browsers (there are no new ones) are starting to break on some web sites. The 233-G3 was pre-USB and the PCI cards don't work with a lot of things.
So we bought a Mac in 1984, 1991, 1998 and now it's 2005. Any student of linear algebra knows that it's time for a new one. What to buy? It's become very clear to me that any machine today is probably fast enough for most everyting we need and the only reason that hardware doesn't last is the software/hardware conspiracy that requires continous upgrades so that they can continue to make money.
So what is it? iMac, PowerMac, MacMini or a laptop. Somehow, I've never been crazy about that all in one model that Apple has sold over the years though I liked the original. Monitors and CPUs seem to break and become obsolete at such different rates that I kind of like them decoupled. Do we wait for Mac on Intel? I don't think so. I still have a lot of software that runs on System 9 that I'd have to replace. I couldn't possibly justify repurchasing hardly any of it but I like to know that I have it. So I'm thinking a mini might be nice. Takes up a lot less space. Still runs OS 9. Doesn't costs an arm and a leg though it costs a butt-load more than Apple would have you believe. Looks cute and might even make it's way into the living room. The PowerMac is just too big and pricey for our usage. And I don't really like a portable for the house. So a Mini it is. We'll probably wait for a speed bump or a price drop and I'll try to get as much of that sexy stuff as I can when I buy. Sexy stuff is the superDrive, 1 gig of ram, airport and bluetooth, wireless keyboard and mouse and maybe a really cool LCD monitor. Like I said, it won't be cheap.
So those are the plans. Now I have to figure out how to make our old G3, really start looking like the dog it needs to be to get my lovely wife on board.
A couple of things worth mentioning. I have bought a Dell PC laptop in the last year for my company that is going out of business. I needed the PC because I was planning on selling some automation that was driven by VB-6. I'm trying to make this one not count as a computer. I also bought some Apple stock about 1990. After 15 years, it's only a fair investment and that's been true only because of the run up of the last year. But it's been fun to watch.
Well, gotta run for now.
bye
