Bigger, faster, better !?!
With Microsoft ending its support of Windows XP, the time has come to make a jump in my desktop software and hardware.
In 1982, people had not quite figured out what personal computers were for, but I knew that I could write sermons, lessons, keep up with my pastoral work and eventually jump onto a yet-to-be created internet.
My first IBM PC was an amazing 8086 system with two 180K drives - BIG floppies. Hard drives were a couple of years away. I could "Write" with one disk and then swap that out and "print" using another. The system cost a whopping $5k. I was one of the first pastors to have one of these machines and people knew I was really nuts, including the members of my congregation who worked for IBM and Data General.
I had a monochrome monitor a 9 pin printer and worked the hummy out of the thing.
Then followed the 386, 486, Pentiums, AMDs and now, my new i7 processor, which is essentially a mini mainframe.
I have a screen print of an ITT 4116 RAM chip - 4K - where you can see the on and off gates where the binary code plays hide and seek.
I have tried to push the limits of everything I have ever owned, testing all of their capabilities and knowing how they worked and what they could really do - and honestly trying to apply that to myself. Pushing is just natural for me.
Electronic things that were fast and productive got s l o w and I pushed for more speed and capabilities.
Along came computer graphics and publishing, sound and high resolution color monitors. I owned a couple of Power PCs just for the MAC experience. 2 years was enough.
My chrome and negative film images could be scanned and manipulated without the stench of the chemical darkroom. But I miss the magic of seeing things come to life in the developing trays.
I know that a PC is like a Mr. Coffee or an electric razor. It is an appliance that will have its day. It is a consumable.
With my new system my software gets to breathe more easily and run faster. They promise a 5 second boot.
Movie rendering will be FAST. This thing has an SLi video card with a whole gig of ram - just on the video card.
Photoshop will scream and RAW files will load in a zippy fashion.
I bought the Win 7 Pro because it has a Win XP emulation mode that lets me use my older software that might not work in the Win 7 environment.
However, in a month, 6 months or sometime. I will be adding RAM and wondering when Intel will be bringing out its i9.
I am very patient with people - machinery gets little slack.
We'll see.
I still have a dependable Win 2000 Pro, an XP Pro machine, a Linux Ubuntu system and a Windows 98 system with over $4k of software on it from Adobe. It weighs almost as much as my truck and has some wonderful abilities.
We'll see what Quark does.
We'll just see. We'll monitor and report. © tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com
