- May 12, 2000
- 9,359
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My first PC was a Tandy 1000 SX which I got in 1987. I didn't even have a desk at home then and any time I needed to sit and work I did it at the dining room table. I had no idea what I was getting into.
Soon a new desk came, and a chair, and accessories for the new PC; a printer, a desk lamp, a set of speakers, various 5.25" floppy disk holders, cables, cables and more cables. I started building PCs in the early 90s. With that came boxes, hardware boxes, manuals, spare parts, lots of spare parts... and more cables. Somehow, like every good PC builder I ended up with boxes and boxes of cables, endless webs of cables to god knows what, and AC adapters! More AC adapters than you could shake a stick at.
By the late 90s I had enough parts hoarded to start a small PC hardware store! Closets began to fill with parts, so many boxes they started getting stacked in the "computer room". Ahh yes, by now I had an entire room devoted to PCs with two desks and four to five PCs and monitors running, with at least 3-4 PCs not running, in various stages of chaos sitting around. Case panels are propped everywhere; sometimes I didn't even have the case anymore. Huge towers of CDs stood like monuments to the PC gods, some 300 to 400 tall, none with cases of course.
Then came the servers. Real servers, not glorified PCs. Big servers, loud servers, heavy Dell and HP iron, 2 and 4 U rackers with my own home built racks. Seven large servers in all, all humming along, heating the planet, chugging along at whatever I had them doing. With the servers came more parts, spares, and more cables, lots more. Power strips everywhere, UPSes and KVM switches crammed in every open nook. Hubs, routers, switches and Cat5 jungles with LEDs flickering lit up the dark room.
Then came the LCDs. Behold the LCD. Good bye CRT, hello LCD. Two per PC, at least, sometimes three, sitting on new desks, solid oak, no particle board here and as always, new cables, goodbye RGB cables, banished to the cable heap you go, hello DVI! And new keyboards and mice as well, now wireless! Goodbye old keyboards and mice, to the parts boxes for you, piling high, sometimes to the ceiling.
The computer room became a living thing, breathing, consuming power, producing data, hogging bandwidth. You must have a business account proclaimed with cable co! Screw you! Caps are for saps! The upgrades continued, old hardware shoved to the closets. Motherboards, video cards, hard drives, thousands of pounds worth of hard drives, enough to build a hard drive fortress. Stacked higher and higher, obsolete, yesterday?s news, forgotten. The beast grew and grew and grew some more, until maintaining it became a full time effort. Hours and hours, spent managing the beast, tweaking, debugging, testing and upgrading.
Then one day a baby came. Now family wants to visit, but where will they sleep? The two spare bed rooms are now the beast and the graveyard. No beds would fit and even if they did the noise was terrible. The beast had to be destroyed. It attacked me with flying PCBs and cables, tried to tie me or dump heavy boxes on me. Finally, I flipped the breaker and starved for power it started to wither and die as its UPSes slowly drained. Hard drives spun down, LCDs went dark, speakers fizzled, and wireless devices stopped transmitting. The last LEDs blinked, the last bytes processed and the last keystrokes struck. Node by node, powering down. Finally, the beast was dead.
Inventory began. What to keep? What to sell? What to give away? What to toss? I ended up selling the servers, save for two which I fed to my friend?s beast which has consumed his garage. In all over 100 hard drives were recycled, about 10 PCs were tossed or given away. Spare parts worth anything were eBayed and the rest were tossed. Cables were tossed, desks were sold, racks were sold or tossed. The computer room and graveyard became bedrooms again.
What remains? One notebook, which I am typing on now. Two PCs, which are stacked neatly in the closet, two LCDs, also neatly stacked and one single box of parts, also stacked neatly. One wireless router and one printer. That's it. I doubt the PCs will be used any time soon. I have a card table sitting in me and my wife?s bedroom with the notebook and printer setup... just three cables - two power cables and one USB cable. The cable modem and router are tucked away in a crawl space, out of site.
The house is quiet, and cool. The power bill is low; the bandwidth is low, downgraded to a basic 1.5 mbps connection. Family now visits and sleeps comfortably and quietly. The hallways are clear of boxes and the closets are full of clothes. Sometimes at night I think I hear the two survivor PCs talking to each other in the closet. I know what they're scheming. Someday they'll rebuild and re-conquer the spare bed rooms, someday, but not today.
Soon a new desk came, and a chair, and accessories for the new PC; a printer, a desk lamp, a set of speakers, various 5.25" floppy disk holders, cables, cables and more cables. I started building PCs in the early 90s. With that came boxes, hardware boxes, manuals, spare parts, lots of spare parts... and more cables. Somehow, like every good PC builder I ended up with boxes and boxes of cables, endless webs of cables to god knows what, and AC adapters! More AC adapters than you could shake a stick at.
By the late 90s I had enough parts hoarded to start a small PC hardware store! Closets began to fill with parts, so many boxes they started getting stacked in the "computer room". Ahh yes, by now I had an entire room devoted to PCs with two desks and four to five PCs and monitors running, with at least 3-4 PCs not running, in various stages of chaos sitting around. Case panels are propped everywhere; sometimes I didn't even have the case anymore. Huge towers of CDs stood like monuments to the PC gods, some 300 to 400 tall, none with cases of course.
Then came the servers. Real servers, not glorified PCs. Big servers, loud servers, heavy Dell and HP iron, 2 and 4 U rackers with my own home built racks. Seven large servers in all, all humming along, heating the planet, chugging along at whatever I had them doing. With the servers came more parts, spares, and more cables, lots more. Power strips everywhere, UPSes and KVM switches crammed in every open nook. Hubs, routers, switches and Cat5 jungles with LEDs flickering lit up the dark room.
Then came the LCDs. Behold the LCD. Good bye CRT, hello LCD. Two per PC, at least, sometimes three, sitting on new desks, solid oak, no particle board here and as always, new cables, goodbye RGB cables, banished to the cable heap you go, hello DVI! And new keyboards and mice as well, now wireless! Goodbye old keyboards and mice, to the parts boxes for you, piling high, sometimes to the ceiling.
The computer room became a living thing, breathing, consuming power, producing data, hogging bandwidth. You must have a business account proclaimed with cable co! Screw you! Caps are for saps! The upgrades continued, old hardware shoved to the closets. Motherboards, video cards, hard drives, thousands of pounds worth of hard drives, enough to build a hard drive fortress. Stacked higher and higher, obsolete, yesterday?s news, forgotten. The beast grew and grew and grew some more, until maintaining it became a full time effort. Hours and hours, spent managing the beast, tweaking, debugging, testing and upgrading.
Then one day a baby came. Now family wants to visit, but where will they sleep? The two spare bed rooms are now the beast and the graveyard. No beds would fit and even if they did the noise was terrible. The beast had to be destroyed. It attacked me with flying PCBs and cables, tried to tie me or dump heavy boxes on me. Finally, I flipped the breaker and starved for power it started to wither and die as its UPSes slowly drained. Hard drives spun down, LCDs went dark, speakers fizzled, and wireless devices stopped transmitting. The last LEDs blinked, the last bytes processed and the last keystrokes struck. Node by node, powering down. Finally, the beast was dead.
Inventory began. What to keep? What to sell? What to give away? What to toss? I ended up selling the servers, save for two which I fed to my friend?s beast which has consumed his garage. In all over 100 hard drives were recycled, about 10 PCs were tossed or given away. Spare parts worth anything were eBayed and the rest were tossed. Cables were tossed, desks were sold, racks were sold or tossed. The computer room and graveyard became bedrooms again.
What remains? One notebook, which I am typing on now. Two PCs, which are stacked neatly in the closet, two LCDs, also neatly stacked and one single box of parts, also stacked neatly. One wireless router and one printer. That's it. I doubt the PCs will be used any time soon. I have a card table sitting in me and my wife?s bedroom with the notebook and printer setup... just three cables - two power cables and one USB cable. The cable modem and router are tucked away in a crawl space, out of site.
The house is quiet, and cool. The power bill is low; the bandwidth is low, downgraded to a basic 1.5 mbps connection. Family now visits and sleeps comfortably and quietly. The hallways are clear of boxes and the closets are full of clothes. Sometimes at night I think I hear the two survivor PCs talking to each other in the closet. I know what they're scheming. Someday they'll rebuild and re-conquer the spare bed rooms, someday, but not today.
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