No, not the soulless corporate ‘machine’ in Pink Floyd’s classic — I had just escaped from there, lol.
WARNING: Geek Post Ahead!
Welcome back to our 20th anniversary ‘look back’ at how it all began. Let’s talk 2004 tech! ‘The machine’ in question here being the BRAND NEW Dell Dimension 8400 tower that I bought as the first of the newly-launched Diamond Mind’s (tax deductible) start-up expenses. Pre-loaded with Windows XP, a powerful 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium processor, an incredible 150 gb of hard drive space, and a whopping 512 MB of memory. And all of this processing power attached to the Internet with — get this — a 56k modem!
Seriously, all overwrought superlatives aside, this new machine was quite an upgrade from my prior (and beloved) Gateway Select. Beloved because it was the first PC that I had personally owned — previously it was all laptop loans from work, and a word processor that I bought in the early 90s and carted around for YEARS but never did a damn thing on — but also beloved because it ran Windows 98, the best O/S ever. (And also also beloved because it was where I had spent countless hours playing Half-Life, Duke Nukem, Outlaws, etc. But that’s a post for another day!)
The old Gateway, while still rocking the same 56k modem, only housed an AMD Athlon 600 MHz processor, and that, along with the 20 gb hard drive and 128 mb of RAM, just couldn’t cut it in the high-speed world of web design, lol. Plus the tower was too big to fit under my new corner desk (the second major purchase, ha). So it had to go… to my in-laws, where it nobly provided many, many more years of quality service (read: Solitaire and Tetris).
Let’s see, what other awesome things were part of the new setup? A brand new wired keyboard and PS/2 mouse came with the Dell — no biggies there — and both old and new PCs had the (at the time, required) 3.5″ floppy disk drive (though the disks were no longer floppy, lol), and both had (for me, required) a CD-RW drive. I did upgrade the new Dell from a DVD drive to a DVD+RW, which was cool. But the best part — maybe even better than all the new processing speed and disk space — was replacing my old CRT-style, ginormous, desk-hogging monitor with my very first flat-panel! An LCD (from Circuit City, my local go-to at the time for tech) with a crazy big 17″ display (1280×1024 max resolution).
All the better to build those 860 or 1024 pixel-wide websites that were standard for the time, ha ha! But that also is a post for another day…