Desktop Generations

I happened to have all of my desktop computers together and unhooked from everything, so I took a family photo.



It's an interesting progression. My first real desktop (not pictured) was actually a hand-me-down from my family. It was a custom built 486 DX. Whoa baby, was that a smokin machine. It started life with a 300 MB harddrive and was later upgraded by me to a whopping gig for $300. I think I got 300 MB worth of spam today.

Anyway, the Gateway machine served me well. It took me through the backend of college and gave me a workout when I had to move it between school and home. That thing is a metal monster. I actually set it on my toe while arranging the picture and multiple curse words came out of my mouth. I purposedly bought the biggest tower they offered because I just knew I'd want to cram all sorts of hardware upgrades in there. I've been meaning to put a drive in the Gateway and give it to someone deserving for about 3 years now. One of these days...

The Dell was even better. Enough horsepower to pull a beer wagon, wicked stealth styling, and a really crappy flap on the front that hid the worst designed USB ports of all time! I dump on it now, but it was a great computer in its day too. I recently retired that one. I have little use for XP these days at home and it was just burning electricity and contributing to clutter. Plus, it is about a year past due for an OS reinstall. I swear it has malware of some sort on it even though scans show nothing. Every five minutes a program flashes in the task bar and then disappears. I haven't let it sit on the Internet longer than a few minutes in months. The Dell also shows one of the only times I carried forward hardware. I paid a premium for that Plextor burner because it did CD-TEXT. I used to rock a 300 disc CD changer and would dupe all of my CDs with CD-TEXT for that player. Nero had a great disc copy that would add CD-TEXT. That was mucking that I enjoyed because it helped me enjoy my music.

The Grandson in this photo is the Mac mini. The mini was my switcher experiment. If you've read any of my other posts, you know the experiment was a success. I like my mini, but I purposely bought it underpowered to save cash and it just isn't up to the task of being the main computer at home. It is fabulous in the office though. It is tiny, quiet, and not fugly. Notice the lack of silly stickers and a color scheme that doesn't remind you of roller blades.

The decreasing tower size directly reflects my disdain for mucking with my computers and desire to have a computing device that has a little more style. I used to think I had to have the biggest tower because what if I wanted to drop 5 drives inside? Well, I never went past 3 drives, and I've never gone past 2 optical drives. I don't see myself needing to add on a Blu-ray burner anytime soon, so I'd like my new desktop computer to skip the tower completely!

What does your computer lineage look like?