Originally intended to document my experience of DeLorean ownership, focus is often radical and strange, boring and obtuse.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Twenty Years of Technology

P4, son of Abacus.In 1987 my parents bought a home computer for my sister and me. It was an IBM clone 286 with a quarter meg of RAM and came with a mouse, which was unheard of at the time.

My friends were amazed by the VGA colour monitor, but very disappointed that we couldn’t swap files because of the weird new 3" disk drive. Years later even our high school computers still used 5-1/4 disks, so I could never bring anything home to work on. Nothing could be saved to our hard drive without deleting one of the two programs it came with and the modem was literally useless because there was no one else we could connect to. In fact, my mom was the only person who even knew what a modem was.

It's like I have lived the past 20 years in a cocoon. And I finally broke out of the crusty brown thing this weekend when I bought my first DVD-burner, a Pioneer model. It was on sale at a place called Summit Direct for $39. I thought it was a good deal, although, admittedly, I have no idea.

It's a 40x8x12 if I remember correctly. Again, I have no idea if this is good, but for $39, I didn’t think I could go wrong.

I also picked up some Kodak 8x re-writeable DVD -Rs. Each DVD holds 4.7 gigs of info, which is 50% larger than the hard drive from my old Pentium 2. The 50-pack cost $16. For $16 I could have bought eight mini cartons of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, or 6-1/2 cupcakes from Cupcakes, or 3 minutes of time here.

After installing the burner and the Nero 7 software, I burned my first DVD on the weekend. It felt like 2001. Man, I’ve a lot of catching up to do.

Labels: , ,

7 Comments:

Blogger Kelly said...

My family didn't get a computer until 1994 and we weren't on the net until 1997.

1:08:00 PM

 
Blogger Martini said...

When I was in college (95-97) my family breifly got internet. I've been living on hand-me-down computers (and no internet) since then.

3:12:00 PM

 
Blogger mmat said...

does it burn VHS too?

3:51:00 PM

 
Blogger Martini said...

Yep. It even burns warts off my toes.

8:10:00 PM

 
Blogger Monogram Queen said...

I only got on a computer for the first time in 1998 so i'm a total ignoramus about anything you just wrote except modem and mouse. Yep I know what those are!

9:43:00 AM

 
Blogger honkeie said...

I had the same pc when i was a kid lol. But welcum to the future of home made dvd porn movies.....well at least that what I hear ppl use it for....

9:11:00 AM

 
Blogger Martini said...

So Honkeie2, how do I blur out my face?

10:52:00 AM

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home

 

This many people accidentally stumbled upon my site
...while searching for porn.