A trip down memory lane

Apple has updated their list of vintage and obsolete products. Man, that takes me back.

Cute of them to break the US list down into “vintage” and “obsolete”–vintage is apparently products discontinued between five and seven years ago, while obsolete products were discontinued more than seven years ago. In the rest of the world, there is no vintage status–once a product was discontinued more than five years ago, it goes straight to the dump without a charmed afterlife basking in the glow of vintage status.

So Colonel Kurtz, an 8500, is now like a fine wine, while High Plains Drifter, a PowerBook 190cs, is now officially obsolete and useless. They’re both sitting out in the garage gathering dust, waiting for rapture or for me to move again, at which point they will join a landfill somewhere.

Also in the garage is LandShark, a venerable IIci, the best computer I’ve ever owned. It will not go to a landfill. I will never throw it away. LandShark has crossed the Atlantic twice in carry-on luggage. Putting a mighty 12 megs of RAM in it–thus turning it into the Ultimate Photoshop Rig–still stands as one of my favorite computer memories.

Keeping them company in the garage is Mecha, a now-gutted Dell Dimension PII/400. Mecha was the machine I cut my Linux teeth on, and it served a long and useful life as a file server.

Time marches on.