Requiem For A Powerbase 180
First published 9/9/1999

Sigh. I don’t know if it’s the power supply or what, but I have the sad duty of reporting that my computer is dead.

I won’t pretend it didn’t have its faults. Sometimes it would crash in the middle of important work. Sometimes it would send vital files spinning off into nothingness for no understandable reason. But generally, it got the job done. Yes, it will be missed.

The say computers age like dogs -- seven of their years for every one of ours. If that’s true, computers must have careers like Olympic gymnasts, because mine was only 28 computer-years old and it was already getting pretty long in the tooth. The bits and bytes didn’t seem to be flying as fast as they had been. (I mean, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 -- four years of that and no wonder it was getting a little tired.)

Yes, my computer was born back in the heady days of 1995, at the very dawn of the mid-nineties. Jumanji-mania was sweeping the movie theaters; Baywatch Nights was revolutionizing television; and the controversial music of Hootie and the Blowfish was polarizing society like never before. It was during this exciting and tumultuous time that my computer was new.

Oh, it was a cocky so-and-so, my computer. Packed full of megahertz, it would strut its stuff for me and my friends. We’d watch in awe as it effortless took us through a level of Doom. Its four-times CD ROM drive was the stuff of legend. And its vast, empty 150 megabyte hard drive seemed to stretch on to infinity, a giant canvas pregnant with possibilities.

But time is a predator who catches all of us, to paraphrase Malcolm McDowell in Star Trek VII. A mere four years after those salad days, my computer had been brought to its knees by advances in the software industry, whose engineers work tirelessly to create slower and slower programs so we have to buy faster and faster computers just to do what we were already doing before.

The sad thing is my computer died just a few weeks too soon. Apple’s introducing some new Macintosh G4s right away, and I was kind of hankering for one. How much faster is a G4 than my former computer? If you can imagine one of those evolution diagrams, where a series of monkeys on the left leads up to a modern human on the right, and if a G4 was the modern human, then my computer would be, oh, say... a fish flopping in the mud, way, wayyy to the left, about ten feet off the edge of the picture.

But the G4 isn’t out yet, and my computer’s broken now. What’s a fella to do? I could just not have a computer for a few months. I hear there’s trees and sunlight and stuff outside. There’s apparently some analog version of email called "the telephone." And I guess, down at the corner store, they even have hard copy versions of globeandmail.com available, printed out on some kind of newspaper stock.

I don’t know quite what I’m going to do just yet. I’m still in mourning. Maybe I’ll feel better after I lay my computer to rest. It deserves something dramatic; maybe I’ll make a pyre out of firewood and give it a Viking funeral.

Then again, if the power supply really is bad, maybe all I have to do is leave it plugged into the wall and it’ll burst into flames all on its own.

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