This is actually my entry into the Technologizer’s Worst PC in America contest, just recently submitted.
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Where to begin…
My “Worst PC in America” was actually my first PC. That should fill one with fond memories and nostalgia, but not so in this case.
The year is 1989. My parents (as I was just 6 at the time) brought home a shiny, new, expensive, somewhat prestigious toy – a Toshiba T1200F. And wasn’t she marvelous?
So life began anew in our home. Our current 286 desktop was laughed at and relegated to the junk pile because of this new beacon of fantastic future technologies! Or something. I remember being introduced to the joys of WordPerfect and FCRemote whilst sitting in my mom’s office, listening to far off voices tell me that this was the future!
Fast-forward a few years. It is now 1993, and things have changed. No longer did the svelte 11lb weight of the Toshiba or its curvaceous plastic exterior appeal to my parents, and lo did a new desktop – a 486! – enter the household. I guess the 640×200 screen resolution wasn’t enough for some people. The laptop was given to me, and I got sent to a special school, specializing in early introduction of technology to children. Oh, how I loved it. And the fact that I could take my computer to school by using the trusty carrying handle – my pride knew no bounds.
For a while, everything was gravy. The honeymoon abruptly ended when my ’special’ school installed a load of Macintosh SE30’s. How quickly my poor Toshiba lost its luster…but it was still mine. So what if they had a few more megahertz of processing power, or more memory? I still had 640KB!
I was still fiercely proud of having the only laptop at school, despite the fact that classmates might be scrolling away on their CRT displays with a mouse…I had DOS 3.3, thankyouverymuch, and that was all I needed…
…until I didn’t have it anymore…
You see, my Toshiba T1200F didn’t have a hard disk – that was the T1200H. Instead, it relied on dual floppy disks – one to load the OS and one to run programs. I’d carry around the program disks that I needed, but always leave the DOS disk in place, inserted in it’s drive, so that I could take advantage of the computers fast 10-second boot times when needed. Oh, how that floppy drive betrayed my the fateful day that somehow, somewhere, the eject button was bumped and the disk ceased to exist in my universe.
What was I to do? It wasn’t like I could simply torrent another copy of the OS. So, the computer sat. It sat around for several years, gathering dust and growing bitter, until I managed to make a new DOS disk! Joy. But by then, well…the external modem had lost it’s charm, the IO ports had tarnished and it just paled in comparison to that new wonder of wonders, Windows 95.
But did my parents get me a new computer? No. All those years of using progressively better technologies and, on a whim, resurrecting an old system got me what? It got me a 286 primary computer in 1996! Oh sure, I could still process words and send electronic mails, but how I longed for a color display and a mouse!
Can you imagine the humiliation?
The suffering at the quick-witted barbs and jabs of my classmates, with their HP’s and IBM’s?
The cruelty of teenagers is only redoubled when their target was a peer they were envious of years ago…I was now paying the price for the cool-kid factor of the T1200.
When I’d finally mowed enough lawns and saved enough money, I got a Windows box of my very own and the T1200 was retired to a quiet corner of the office to rot gracefully. Until last night.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that this is the worst PC in America…not because it is old, nor because of its aged looks or raggedy ports or clickety keyboard. Not because of its 720K floppy based operation which punished the absent-minded. No. This is the worst because of what it did to me in my formative years, leading me to believe in its shiny promises of the future, and then embarrassing me to a group of people I know longer know nor care about…
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October 16, 2009
I can only term this post…scrumtrulescent.