I am sitting here staring at the pinwheel of death. It’s not my death, but the end of my trusty computer’s useful life.
Like me, everything it does these days is slow. Switching applications is a process. In the old days, it would sprint from one task to another, happily keeping up as I bashed my way through our taxes or editing stories.
Now, not so much. It chugs through its chores, spinning pinwheels as it figures out how to load an application.
My computer is 11 years old – a dinosaur in computer years. It’s ready for the boneyard.
Now comes the painful part. The time has come to shop for its replacement. Ugh. Just looking at computer ads makes me tired. They’re all gobbledygook. Here’s a computer with a “12‑core CPU, 38‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine.”
What does that even mean? Will it turn on when I hit the button? Will it do what I want it to do?
Will it run for 11 years before I have to replace it?
These are important questions the ads don’t answer.
I remember the first computer I ever used at work. It was a state-of-the-art pile of junk. Temperamental, noisy – and it required its own air-conditioned room. That’s saying something because this was in Alaska.
And it needed to be “rebooted” several times a day. I don’t know what that involved but I imagine the computer tech stuck his boot up its random access memory.
It still didn’t help me with my jobs. One was compiling the television schedules for the newspaper’s TV magazine. I had to “draw” each line using computer code. To do a week’s worth of schedules took an entire afternoon.
Now I could do it in a few minutes, even on my old computer.
The next few computers weren’t much better. I would put them in the “barely adequate” category. All of them needed a lot of hand-holding.
One day, a plain cardboard box was delivered to my office. It was an Apple Mac SE.
It might as well have been a space ship. It had a tiny black-and-white screen and fit on my desk. All I could do is turn it on. There was no owner’s manual. (It was a hand-me-down from the computer wizards at the home office.)
I paid a friend $25 and he taught me how to it run. Then I spent a day on the copy desk at The Seattle Times learning how they used it to make color maps and other graphics.
Pretty soon, it became a valuable tool, a stark contrast to its predecessors, which were mainly a pain in the rear.
After that, I made my peace with computers. I didn’t play games on them, but they helped me get my job done. I could write stories, draw maps and even design pages with them.
Too cool!
These days, I do some heavy lifting with my computer, working with programs in the “cloud.” I can edit photos, massage spreadsheets and a hundred other things.
But my poor old computer just isn’t up to it anymore. Those pinwheels keep spinning.
Carl Sampson is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
