MUSE > COMP

Shortly after discovering Classic Mode in WP11 yesterday, I discovered the same sort of function inside of Word 2003. With Word, you can go into the General Options screen and select blue & white environment. Couple that with a terminal-looking font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is my poison) and Word’s Full Screen mode, and viola! Blue skies screen from corner to corner. Just lettin’ you know the heights of my geektitude.

After rereading yesterday’s entry, I decided to make a list (because that’s what I do) of the computers my family, and later me alone, have owned.

A little pre-history: My dad used to be the Data Processing Manager of an environmental consulting firm, which basically meant he ran an IT department before it was called “IT”. Anyway he would bring home these workstations from time to time presumably to get some work done at home over the weekends or whatever. I have no idea what they were, except that I remember they had displays like the old arcade game Berzerk, and there was this awesome moon lander game. Dad would bring these machines home and let my brother and me tool around on them for a bit, teaching us (or maybe just me... Lincoln would have been quite a youngster at this point) some command-line prompts (this was well before the Mac even came out), light programming (for-next loops, a little thing that generated a random field of asterisk “stars”) and the like. Storage media for this thing was a 12” floppy drive. Not 7, not 5.25, but 12”. Glorious.

Tandy-riffic: In 1982, they turned me and two of my classmates loose on the computing world, letting us tool around with a trio of brand-new TRS-80s. We learned logic, and programming, and the joy of letting X equal whatever the hell we wanted it to. That Christmas, the parentals broke down and got one of those dream machines for the house. Storage media was a tape drive. Audio tape. As in, cassettes. I was thrilled one day when I figured out how to play back something I’d recorded on audio tape (like the latest episode of Knight Rider) through the “monitor” (actually an old b/w TV we had). Looking back, I guess it was my earliest piracy of a broadcast show.

Apple ][: In LEAP, the program at school, we moved up to Apple ][e’s the following school year and learned a shitload of BASIC. We also played some educational games, like Snooper Troops, Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand. The Milner household didn’t follow suit until 1987, when we (and by “we” I mean my mom) bought a Limited Woz Edition of the ][gs. In addition to the regular stuff I’d learned in LEAP, the ][gs introduced me to the worlds of the 3.5” diskette (wait, it’s smaller than the 5.25” drive, but it holds 1.4 MEGS?) and the mouse-based GUI. It could run on an OS that was called ProDOS. The word-processing program we used with it was called Multiscribe GS, and was the ][gs equivalent of MacWrite (WYSIWIG, donchknow, when all the fonts had city names and you could see how they’d look right on the screen!). It was in Multiscribe GS that I eventually authored the Rhetoric Journal, my first attempt at desktop publishing.

Insanely great: After dealing for one semester in college with a Brother word processor with non-standard storage media and terrifically loud printing (typing, to me more to the point), Mom got me a Performa 400. It was the sold-in-Sears version of the LCII, and came with a bunch of consumer-friendly enhancements to the OS (7.0P1) that I quickly dispensed with. After using Macs through all of junior high and high school, I finally had one of my own. It lasted through my entire college career, and was only retired when the logic board started failing in 1997. It was with this Mac that I first explored online communities, first on AOL (version 1.0, baby!) and later the internet. I replaced that one with a Power Mac 4400, which seemed, at the time, like the powerhouse of all powerhouse machines. I was finally able to run stuff like After Dark 4 (ah, After Dark, we barely knew thee), and other stuff that was PowerPC-only (what would now be known as “G2” in Apple’s nomenclature).

I Join the Dark Side: After a crazy seven years using that second Mac (only two Macs in 12 years), I replaced it last year with the machine I’m working on now, a Dell Precision desktop. My processor, storage and memory all have the Giga- prefix. I can run Access (something I was always hurting for on the Mac, because I love Access), and generally felt left behind from Apple after the thousands of dollars I spent on computers and software for my pre-OSX models were more or less irrelevant in the New Order. (As a sidenote, it occurs to me that Hanson and I shall ever be on opposite sides of the platform wars. No sooner did I evangelize the hell out of him and convinced him to buy a Mac, I switched to Windows.)

Being only a year old, I anticipate upgrading the hell out of this machine before its day is due. Improvements I want to make: larger monitor, better video card (maybe a TV card with capturing stuffs), a second HD (for Linux, fnord), maybe Firewire, maybe DVD burning... who knows.

By the by, Waterhouse is currently in Hour 82 of the Great Internet Blackout of 2005.