post-move

It is truly amazing the amount of stuff one can accumulate over time. Now, it's understandable that I would have drum and music gear that can take up a lot of space, along with the various bikes. But when you keep hanging on to things like very obsolete computers then it's time for a sanity check!

The very first computer I bought back in 1990 was (don't laugh) an Atari. A 1040ST to be exact, with a whopping 1 meg of RAM. The reason I bought it was because not only was it cheaper than a Mac, it came with built-in MIDI ports for doing music work, something no other manufacturer offered. It's been said that musicians kept Atari alive long after the gamers had moved on to other platforms (my machine my have been one of the few that never had a game played on it), and I was one of them. ;) It cost me $1000 for the machine, and another $500(!!) for the MIDI software (Notator, which morphed into Logic, one of the current industry standards). I even used this beast to get on the Net back in '95, via National Capital FreeNet using the Lynx text browser!


And of course the ultra-ergonomic mouse...

(not that the PowerMac's original one was much better.)

When I bought my first Mac back in '99 I transferred most of the MIDI files over, though it was a bit of a pain because I was going to new software and it didn't recognize Notator's loop function. And since I didn't move all of the files (and because I had the shelf space) my Atari set-up stayed around. And it had grown over the years, due to people giving me the darn things, so I had two monitors and two hard drives, including the largest hard drive Atari ever made, the mighty Megafile 60 (a whopping 60 megs).

(and due to its fan noise it sounded like a small vacuum cleaner when you fired it up)

But then the move into smaller living quarters comes up and it was time for a purge. Funnily enough, someone bought all my Atari gear for $50, but my upgraded PowerMac 7500, which served me well with almost no grief from 1999 until June 2006, had to be given away.