As Far As I Can Tell

I’m going to Sturgis tomorrow morning to help my Dad get his new computer up and running. He was an early adopter, buying an 8088 IBM PC compatible before I even remember. It had 512K of RAM, a 10MB hard drive, and two 5.25” floppy disc drives. He did his books through specialized farm management software. I played math games. I was lucky back then to grow up in a house that had a computer.

Unfortunately he hasn’t upgraded much since. About 5 years ago I got him a machine that runs DOS on with a blazing 486SX/25 under the hood. The machine he just bought is a Pentium 4 1.8Ghz. I can’t even calculate—that’s a whole decade faster.

Since he’s migrating his old data over to the new system I dug around and found all the utilities and things I might need while I’m there. I’ve packed a Zip drive for files transfer, three different boot discs, an extra CD-ROM drive and a bunch of disc utilities. This reminds me of the TCS days. While hunting for Zip disks I found one containing a ton of graphics I made while I was in high school. I’ll post some here later; they’re hilarious.

The other big event tomorrow is getting my haircut by Sarah. Now that my stylist is 3 hours away I always let my hair get totally unruly before dealing with it. It’s reached its peak, and can’t stand up under any longer due to its own weight.