Death of the big box PC

Our last big box computer shat to death itself last week. It was going okay, but then things started catastrophically failing, and there were a few tense days where I couldn't get it to boot up at all, and I struggled to save my data, which I only managed to do through the glory of the safe mode.

When I say data, I mean all the kids photos, music collection, old fan fiction I wrote in 1997 and rips of Adam Curtis documentaries. You know, the important stuff in life.

I couldn't blame the computer, it was something like 12 years old, so was ancient for that kind of technology. Usually they only lasted four or five years. By my count it was the fifth big box of computing power that I've owned since the 1990s, and almost certainly the last.

Nobody except the most well-off families in town had a personal computer when I was growing up. There were plenty at school, and I did have friends where we could go play the Dune strategy game, or the first 3D Wolfenstein, but they were little more than tools, even for the people who used them for vital business stuff, and also for playing solitaire when business was slow.

Even with the internet exploding all over the show in the 90s, I didn't get my first PC until around 2000 because they were just so damn expensive. My first attempt was an embarssing failure, as I discovered I had been lumped with an awful credit rating after an unreliable flatmate had fucked me, but I finally had my own computer around the turn of the century. I had to save up the money and pay for it up front to get around that shit credit.

Since then, I've crammed files onto these hard drives until they shiver and shake, and then I've uploaded to a new one. My first one played the first halting internet videos, a few years before Youtube changed everything on that front, but I mainly used my computer to stay in contact with my fan fiction mates.

But the time I had got to this last PC, it had accumulated decades of data storage, movies from the 2000s, all the photos of children and travel. Every CD I've bought or borrowed in the new century got ripped onto the drive, and that's thousands of hours of music. All sorts of insane writings, although I did somehow lose a lot over the years - a film script I once wrote with the great Joe Rice somehow got completely lost, and while that's the one thing I missed the most, it's also makes me wonder what else got lost forever that I didn't even notice.

Now that last PVC has died, all the options seem to be laptop based, and there are few options for a chunky box that takes up precious space in the world. The laptops are slim and delicated, but have just as much computing power, and it's dead easy to hook it up to a bigger screen. Nothing has really changed, although I am annoyed by the lack of CD/DVD drives.

So that's the end of another quiet era, and while that thrill of connection my own computer gave me has evolved into a general weariness with the availability of the world of my phone, I will miss my big box of technology.