I am writing this on Word Perfect for DOS, on a 20 year old PC.
It is a Dell Inspiron 2500, with a Coppermine Pentium III CPU, running at 733 MHz. It has a mindblowing 256 MB of ram, and a 20 GB hard drive.
No wifi. No bluetooth. No nonsense.
This machine is running MS-DOS 7.1 (from Windows ME), alongside Ubuntu 10.10.
In order to get Ubuntu working I had to comment out all the Maverick repositories from /etc/apt/sources.list and replace them with repos from Debian 6, which it was based on. Debian 6 repositories are archived, but still work. Replacing Ubuntu repos with Debian repos allows me to update (sort-of) the software that came with it, and install new software, drivers, and utilities.
In order to get MS-DOS working, I just had to install Windows ME, and patch it to boot directly to DOS, download a mouse driver and a cdrom driver, and modify the PATH to allow COMMAND.COM to find said drivers and load them on boot. For Windows ME, I just had to get the display driver from Dell, which is still available.
Other than that, it works.
It just works.
There’s a certain beauty in its simplicity.
The thing takes about 5 seconds to boot to DOS, and about 20 seconds to boot to a Linux CLI (I disabled the display manager and most of the unnecessary stuff -- who needs a boot splash, anyway?)
I’ve had this machine for years... been using it to do most of the stuff I need to do. And, it delivers.
Modern times have accustomed us, spoiled children of the 21st century, to computing devices that will do anything from vacuum our homes to connect our phone calls to automatically embellish our ever-present pictures (esse est percipi).
But, do we need all of that?
Sometimes, I find myself using my newer(ish) PC -- a Quad Core AMD Phenom 2 @ 3.2 Ghz, 16 GB DDR 3 Ram, dedicated ATI graphics adapter, ~3 TB HD, etc., etc. -- and doing, pretty much, the same things I do on my trusty old Dell: Writing programs, debugging code, blogging about nothing, and, overall, innocently trying to break the thing just so I can “fix” it.
In that sense, a 20 year old computer can do just about as much as a 5 year old computer.
Yet, “obsolete” is a common word, when talking about older hardware, and more modern machines than mine will, often, end up in landfills in an ever-growing thirst for newer, faster, bigger, more modern, hardware.
For my part, I’ve made a commitment: For as long as I can get this machine to do what I need it to do, I’ll continue to use it. I won’t upgrade. I won’t trade. I won’t back down, so to speak...
The way I see it, if we cannot bring ourselves up to the idea that a computer this old can still serve its purpose, then what hope is there for us? Computers are flawless, exact, unbiased, devices. If, in spite of this, we cannot trust them to accomplish their tasks on account of their age, how can we trust ourselves, flawed, weak, biased, inaccurate, humans?
Just exactly how old is too old? Is it determined by age, or by the ability to accomplish any given task? Who or what determines what reasonable expectations are?
Maybe, I’m just getting old.
At 39, and counting, I can remember a time when computers were more than entertainment devices: a time when they were tools, used for learning, creating, and innovating.
They still can be. So, why aren’t they?
The difference lies in the little details. It’s the little distractions that have turned computers into little more than entertainment hubs.
I enjoy watching cat videos as much as the next guy, but to think a tool this powerful is meant to do no more than that is to do it a great injustice.
To determine the relevance of technology by its ability to render high quality cat videos and memes is to lower ourserlves.
Computers took us to the moon.
We’re just not looking up any more...
