| Thursday, April 25, 2002 |
13:57 - Whirring away into the night
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/personaltechnology/134435832_ptnewmac13.html
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An old Mac is being retired.
No, an old Mac. As in, a Mac SE from 1986. And it was still in full-time use, doing newsletters, writing, even networking.
But the venerable machine has been giving us a few problems in recent years.
The school group wanted to put the newsletter up on its Internet site, so we put the newsletter on a disk. But no one could open the disk — the conclusion was that our floppy drive was just a tiny bit off, making the disk unreadable except on our machine. We thought it would make a great encryption device, but the market for it would have been small.
It could no longer be used for even simple things like e-mail on the Internet. And when you turned it on, you got the unhappy Mac face, but if you turned it off and then on again quickly, the happy Mac face appeared.
So they got a new iMac. Mostly for the size, they say-- it fits so easily on the desktop. But, I mean, c'mon... this is a fifteen-year-old machine. And it still works most of the time, enough so that the owners aren't going to junk it. Who could? They're going to put it out to stud-- er, pasture, I mean. It'll graze happily in the out-of-the-workpath fields of pre-hard-drive nostalgia, its happy-Mac startup icon still smiling away.
As noted on The Mac Observer, who fusses this much over the retirement of a truly grizzled old warrior of a computer? Indeed, who writes a column about it? Mac users, that's who. Yeah, we know, it's "just a computer". Yeah, and the PCs I've used have shed parts and turned into dusty old hulks when they outlived their usefulness, donating vital organs toward the birth of new beige boxes. The old cases tend to sit around in closets or get flung into the dump once their still-valuable components have been salvaged. It's hard to tell where one computer ends and the next begins.
But Macs-- well, they have personalities. They're members of the family. And this old veteran is gonna be telling war stories for a long time yet to come.
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