Over the weekend, AWACS died.
AWACS was my first “PC” (as opposed to the Macs and Atari’s I used before), and the first and last computer I ever built from parts.
I bought it as a set of parts from Overseas Computing, perhaps the shadiest, but certainly the unfriendly computer equipment retailer ever.
Sure enough, when I got home, it didn’t work. I read the manual and tried a few jumper settings, then spent the rest of the night staring at the dead box.
When I took it back the next day, the store clerk replaced what turned out to be a broken power supply. Instead of apologizing, he gave me a reprimand. “You shouldn’t be doing this if you haven’t done it before!” I still remember this because it struck me as illogical and frankly indefensible at the time, a shining example of everything that is wrong with people in particular and the whole world in general.
But he may have been right in a sense.
I bought a dual Pentium II motherboard. The Pentium II was quite expensive, so I got a single one, with the idea to upgrade to a dual CPU setup later. Of course that never happened. By the time I was looking to upgrade the CPU they were no longer easily available, and the CPUs that were available wouldn’t fit in the motherboard.
I ended up spending a lot more money, buying a new motherboard and two new Pentium III CPUs in Slot 1 packaging, big heavy slabs of silicon and plastic not unlike old game cartridges. The old motherboard I gave to an old friend, someone I first met through the dial-up BBS “Archie” run by the VPRO in the late eighties/early nineties.
AWACS was the last computer my father gave to me. Now after more than a decade of uninterrupted service the plastics have become yellow and brittle and the efficient whirr-click of the drives has turned into a laborious whine. The optical drives died a long time ago.
And this weekend, one of the hard drives died. After some gentle prodding I managed to bring it back to life, sort of. Then I went out and bought a new machine - just the first thing that seemed decent and wasn’t too expensive.
I copied across a decade worth of files, rebooted, and logged in. Everything was there, like nothing ever happened. Machines have no sense of ceremony.
I’ve called the new machine Ripley, after the greatest female character in popular culture ever. And with a new name comes new resolve.
If AWACS was about command and control at a distance, about detachment and the view from thirty-thousand feet, then Ripley is about being there and getting your ass kicked. And still not giving up.