Think of this as Volume 14, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Over the years I have had nearly as many desktop PCs as cats.
We counted last night.
Kaleidocat (below, in 1979), Nuisance, HeyCat, Lo Meow, McDummy, FurPur, Salem and Rosanna, Indy, Missy, and the incumbents, Midget and Foxy Roxy.
My first PC was a Kaypro, shown on the right in 1983.
I thought it was sweet. CP/M, two floppy drives, an 8-inch green screen, and a case that, while it claimed to be "luggable," was really more like the tube-and-parts cases my dad's TV repair shop had in the 1960s. It weighed 26 pounds.
Then came my IBM PC, bought for a project that became Harbinger EDI. I upgraded it with a hard drive, and then bought a no-brand AT. There was another no-brand (built from parts) bought for Windows 3.1, another (a Gateway I think) bought for Windows 95, and I seem to remember buying another for '98. Then there was the current box, another no-name built from parts, bought in 2004.
So that's 12 cats and 8 PCs. Of course I'm not counting the laptops I've owned, at least a half-dozen in all, or the four PCs I've bought for the kids.
The desktop era ended this week with my latest purchase, an MSI A6200 laptop I had first seen in the hands of a model at last year's CompuTex show. It's more powerful than any desktop I've owned, and today's "docking stations" are just boxes that sit to the side and let you connect anything else you want with USB ports. That means I can replicate my old desktop environment, with an extra monitor, a fancy keyboard, an external mouse, nice speakers.
It's a turning point. Where once I always needed two machines -- one for here and one for the road -- now I get it all with one. The new laptop cost less than half what my old Kaypro did, $700 against $1,800. And the software cost is also lower than ever. Windows is (unfortunately) bundled and everything else is downloaded, free.
Anyone involved in this business in any way needs to understand why this is so. Moore's Law is the flip and easy answer.
It's also misleading.
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