The progression of gadgets and electronics has been something I have been thinking about a lot for the last few days. In the next few days, Apple could possibly announce a life changing device to the market- but what is life changing anyway? When I think about it, nearly every gadget I have owned has been life changing, even within the scope of similar devices. As generations of them progress, they become more featured and intuitive, suiting the needs of the user to a greater degree.
Consequently, all this deep thought on electronics forced me to recall all the gadgets I have owned, so I thought I would share with you the laptops I have owned throughout the years.
My first laptop was given to me in 1996 at age 10. I can’t recall the brand of the computer, but it looked very similar to this photo above. It was grey and thick and ran Windows 95, and what I thought was very interesting about it was that it had a trackball for a mouse. It was heavy and had a small screen, but it could connect to the internet via a phone line and so I loved it!
The next laptop I owned was a Compaq Presario 1200 series which I received in 1999. Coming from that old clunky early 90’s laptop, this thing was light and fast and had a much more attractive form factor, not to mention it had a floppy and CD-Rom drive. It also ran ‘the new operating system’ Windows 98. At the age of 13 when I was given this machine I had no clue about operating systems, but the jump from Windows 95 to 98 opened my eyes to a new world of computing I never understood before. I have since become an OS junkie.
In 2003, the year before I went to college, I bought this even more modern Compaq Presario 2500 series. This had the largest screen of any laptop I had owned, or have owned since. It also had a DVD drive, so this was also the time I converted from VHS to DVD- a little late, I know! This machine also ran, what to me at the time, was a revolutionary new operating system- Windows XP! Everything about this laptop seemed more vibrant and refreshed, and I remember having the distinct feeling when I bought this that I had entered the future.
As we all know, college is a crazy time in a persons life. They learn new things, they experiment- some of it good, some of it bad. As an Art History major in college I was surrounded by these new machines I had very little knowledge of before this time. I mean, as a PC user for all of my life until that point, I had been conditioned to think of Macs as the enemy and an inferior computer to the PC, but I was never really taught why. So, in college I dabbled, and unsurprisingly, I liked it. So, in 2006 after my PC died on me in the middle of Maymester (May semester), I started researching Macs. Coincidentally, this was also nearly the exact same time that the intel based white Macbooks were announced and so I took it as a sign to convert.
By 2009 when I upgraded to a 13 inch Macbook Pro, I was already indoctrinated into the Macintosh lifestyle and haven’t looked back. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for me technologically, as looking back from that very first laptop over 10 years ago, I have made such a substantial jump in my fluency with computers that I wonder how much further it will all progress in the next 10!
This article was excellent!!!!!!