geekdom

as i sat here this evening perusing the various blogs and news sites that i usually enjoy reading, it occurred to me that it has been some time since i had updated my own spot of digitized letters and sentence structures on this space of electronica called the internet.

it is odd how just ten years ago, when i was just out of college, i had the internet. it was a new thing, to be sure. yes, i did have it in college. i was one of the few with aol in my dorm room… that was back before anyone was really into it. this is a digression, but i must also confess a sad story that must be told. we had a pretty crappy computer lab at grace back in the early 90s. one night for some reason, someone was trying to explain to me what email was and that i needed to try it out. so i went down and labored to figure out how to “log on” to this archaeic (even then) pc and type in c://run program e_mail and then 45 lines of substring coding (no idea what i am saying here) and then this exciting list would come up of various people who went to colleges in the united states and beyond that you could apparently write to. the whole process was so exhausting and confusing to me, that in my haste and short sightedness, i said these words…”this email idea is so stupid. no one will ever use this.” it was shortly after this that i got aol version 1.0 and discovered the joys of easy email. of course i didn’t know anyone else who had email, but it was certainly exciting to hear those special words – made famous by tom and meg – “you’ve got mail.” and then there were chat rooms and news rooms… oh the joys of aol in the early days.

it was in the later 90s that i discovered the joys of instant messaging… jp1207 was my first screen name followed quite closely by wonderbox… and that remains my name since 1996, i believe. i am about to celebrate 10 years of life with wonderbox as my screen name. how dorky is it that: 1. i remember this, 2. this is significant to me, and 3. i have been online that long! while we are on the topics of online longevity, in april of 2006 this blog will be 5 years old. another electronic milestone of geekdom celebrated.

in any event, i have come a long way since those ignorant words spoken in 1994. i don’t even know what on earth i would do today without email. for anyone who knows me will testify that if you want anything from me, you better send me an email. don’t tell me because i will not remember. pieces of paper i might lose. but when it is sitting there in my mac mail inbox… it is hard for me to ignore.

for fun, because i think I am bored… here is a brief history of the various computers i have owned and used at work over the years. thank the Lord i have never been swayed by the curse of the cheap pc, but have remained a loyal and faithful macintosh user since the late 80s. So check it out… stories are at the bottom.

Starting from the top left:
� The 512ke – My first Mac. It had a 9″ black and white screen, 512k of RAM, no hard drive, an internal 800k floppy and an external 400k floppy drive.
� The Mac Classic – Off to college with a brand new Mac. This one had a meg or two or RAM, a 30 Meg hard drive and a 1.4 meg floppy.
� The LC520 – Oh yeah… my first color computer. With a 14″ built in color monitor, speakers and a CD drive, I was in heaven. This was the one that I first discovered the joys of AOL.

� The Mac II – This is what we used in the Art Department at Grace and also was what I first used in my job in the Publications department.
� The Mac IIci – smaller and faster than the II, this was what I was so excited about getting. I had a nice Radius monitor – it would flip sideways if you wanted to see a full spread or back to see the single sheet size (great for designing).
� The Quadra 660AV. Oh this was cool cutting edge stuff. Also had the CD drive and all the AV stuff – speakers, mic, you could do voice commands. It rocked. I gave this one to my nephew a few years back for Christmas.

� The 8100 Tower – I used this one at the paper I worked for in Wabash. It was so fast and had a wonderful 21″ color monitor. It had a huge hard drive, tons of memory, CD drive, tape backup system, the works.
� The 9500 Tower – Prof Davis thought it looked like someone stuck a pizza box on the side of these – I kinda agreed. But it was nice and speedy. I think I had 500 meg of RAM on this baby. I used this one for a long time. It was about 1997 til 2001 or so – too long in my opinion.
� During this time, I had not had a computer at home since the LC520. I decided I needed a laptop so I bought one from a guy in NY that my mom knew. It was the Powerbook G3 – 333megahertz, a DVD drive, zip drive… it rocked. Well for a while, then it was just old and slow as computers tend to get.

� The G4 Tower – what a thing of beauty this was. It had a gig of RAM, DVD burner, a 60 gig hard drive. I had it made… It had a beautiful 17″ matching silver and black monitor which I wish I could have kept because it was so pretty.
� The G4 Tower – Redesigned slightly but also pretty daggone powerful. This one had dual processors, 1.5 gig of RAM, and dual DVD drives. I got this one when we started DCDesign. It came with an awesome 22″ LaCie CRT and was blazing fast.
� The Powerbook G4 15″ – After I left DCDesign, I was computerless again, so I bought the best I could afford which was this very laptop that I am typing this on… It had 750 meg of RAM, but for some reason now it only has 500. I need to get that fixed. The 80 gig hard drive is almost full… I think it is time to upgrade already. The good news is that I have Tiger sitting on my desk, ready for installation.
� The iPod 4th gen 40 gig Click Wheel – Not really a computer per se… but still an Apple product which holds like 10,000 songs and I use it constantly – on my prayer walks, at home and in the car (love that FM module!).

So that’s the story of my apple fixation. If anyone has actually read all of this, label me impressed.