My PC history: A road to ruin

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Microsoft has just retired Windows 3.1, a move which got me thinking about my own computing history, and how I ended up with the monstrous desktop machine that now glares at me from the corner of my bedroom. 

My first PC was a Carrera Swift, which was just slightly prettier than a sledgehammer. It had a 14in monitor, a hard drive so small I might as well have welded a floppy disk to the motherboard, no soundcard, CD drive or graphics chip, and I adored it. This will seem daft, but every computer I’ve ever owned had its own character. It’s own quirks and foibles that ensured it was more of a pet than a work machine. The Swift’s foible was that it was rubbish. Completely and utterly rubbish. 

The 4Mb of memory and 25Mhz processor were just enough to make an intruiging slideshow of Doom 2, though thankfully the “turbo” button on the front could knock the processor up to a blistering 33Mhz, and then we were cooking on gas. Not a lot of gas admittedly, but enough to be eating toast in under an hour.

In order to get anything running, whether that was Doom, Word Perfect, or anything else I had to edit the config.sys and autoexec.exe files – plucking out drivers and commands that soaked up that valuable 2k which was the dividing line between a program springing into life, and the odious “not enough conventional memory” refrain which so blighted my early PC days. God I loved that machine. It was complicated, difficult to handle, moody and yet, when it all clicked, fantastic. It’s that girlfriend. The one you know you’re best shot of, and yet the one with whom the highs are so much higher because the lows feel like flooded graves.

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