The Three C's

The three C's: Clothes, Cars and Computers. Huh? you ask. Well, I say, they're the three things I actually own. Sure, there's the occasional makeup & jewelry, but if I don't wear it every day (in which case it's more or less plastered to my body), then I probably don't wear it at all. The exception is nail polish; I have about 5 different bottles I use in rotation. Then I have the things that are essentially leftovers from my childhood that I just couldn't bear to part with. They just kind of sit there and I probably wouldn't rush to save any of them in an emergency (except maybe Cuddles the Seal who keeps me company many a night when Steve is at work). So I have my clothes, my car, and my computer.

Okay, so my mom gave me her old 286. Ah, memories. I dialed into my shell account (at 1200 baud -- and you thought 14.4 was bad) just to see if it would work. It did, but watching pine redraw the screen wasn't my idea of a good time. I was logged in for all of 5 minutes.

Mind you, this is the first computer I ever used that had a modem. The first computer I ever used was a Commodore 64 my mom got in 1981. I was 3, folks. She got the 286 in '89, when it was already obsolete, but not that obsolete. It had a 1200 baud modem (right before the 9600s came out), a lovely CGA monitor (about when the VGA came out but before SVGA) and I loved it. It had a modem, dammit. And I immediately started complaining to my mom that it was too slow. : )

She eventually got a 2400, and then (gasp!) a 14.4 (on a 486 with an SVGA monitor no less) some years later, and I was happy. Still preferred DOS to Windows. She gave the 286 to my older sister, who didn't have a computer. Recently they purchased a Mac, so they gave my mom the 286 back. She had no use for it... so I offered to take it off her hands. See, I miss programming in BASIC. Okay, so I'm weird.

As for the car, I'm getting the new one. Okay, a used one. It's new to me. A '90 Geo Storm. A year newer than the computer... but far from obsolete. Funny how that works.