Thursday 18 December 2014

The history of every computer ever purchased - a personal account

1985   
Salesman - Okay sir, your grand total for the computer and the dot matrix printer comes to $2700, and I’ve signed you up for a college level course in advanced programing, so you’ll know how to operate it.

Me – Then I can play solitaire…right?

1994
Salesman – It’s called Windows 3.1 and it’s much better than DOS. I’m guessing the good folks at Microsoft won’t be able to improve on this operating system at least until the millennium.

Me – I’ll take it! Oh, and throw in that box of 100 floppy discs - those things never go bad.  Plus you never know when you’ll need to transport 1.4 megabytes of data.

1995 
Me – What the hell man….Windows 95? Well if it comes with that internet thingy and solitaire, I’ll take it.

Salesman – And, for an extra $600 you can have that one with a CD burner. You can make mixed CDs which is just like making a mixed tape…only way more complicated.

1999 
Salesman – You‘re buying a computer at exactly the right time. You can skip Windows 97 and 98 and go straight to Windows Millennium – the greatest operating system ever.  Well, either that or Windows 2000.

Me – What’s the difference?

Salesman – I’m not sure, but I can throw in a DVD burner for an extra $600. You can burn your own DVDs and it only takes like…2 days.

2005 
Me - I like that it has 2 USB ports, but are you sure I need a 40 gigabyte hard drive? I’m not running NASA out of my living room you know.

Salesman – You’ll be sorry. There is no such thing as too much hard drive.

2009 
Me - I need a bigger hard drive. I’ve been perfectly legally downloading a lot of movies lately.  

Salesman – This one has a 12 Godzilla-byte hard drive. It will hold 7500 movies, 5 million photos and the entire archives of the Smithsonian Institute.

2014
Me - Ok. I’ll take that one with Windows 8, even though I know you have windows 10 in the back there, and you’re going to roll it out as soon as I walk out the door. Also, I’ll need one with a retinal scanner, warp speed processor, breathalyzer and flux capacitor. And solitaire.”

Salesman – And the cloaking device sir?

Me – How much extra?

Salesman – Only $600 dollars sir.

Me – I’ll take it.