Aug. 2nd, 2007

baratron: (ankh)
I am really upset.

Two days ago, I brought home all the boxes of mine & Richard's stuff that had been stored at my parents' for several years. In doing so, I found lots of things that we'd forgotten we owned, as well as several things that we've been looking for, and haven't been able to understand why we couldn't find. In amongst this stuff was a blue box full of old software and games for the Acorn Archimedes. While I haven't had much interest in Arki for a while, seeing all his software packed up together made me excited, in a "soon I can enjoy RETRO COMPUTING in the comfort of my own home!" sort of way. I was looking forward to finally tidying up the house enough to have a desk with the Acorn set up next to our much younger (but still old) linux box.

Today I found a plastic bag containing the circuit boards, floppy drive and hard drive of the Archimedes. Just thrown in a plastic bag with no effort made to protect them. Some of the components are noticeably bent. The case, keyboard, monitor and mouse have all gone "to a place that recycles computer parts".

WHY, GOD, WHY?!

I know that it is irrational to get upset when it's just $stuff, but that computer was more important to me than many people. When I was a teenager, there wasn't an internet that ordinary people could use - and the only way for a sad, lonely, geek with unusual social skills to make friends was through dial-up bulletin boards or penfriends. With the ridiculous cost of phone calls in the UK at the time, I wasn't ever allowed to use BBSes, although I really wanted to. Instead, I acquired something like 20 penpals in various parts of the country through the pages of magazines like Kerrang! and RAW (rock & metal music), and Acorn User, and that I'd met at the Acorn computing shows. Back then, computers were only interesting to geeks and nerds, so the annual computer show was a way for me to meet people of my kind. I would send my friends letters of 4-8 pages, typed double-sided on my Acorn computer and printed out with an, at the time, extremely high-tech Epson colour dot matrix printer. They were, I suppose, the very early forerunner of my livejournal - a place where I wrote about me and what I was doing, and books I was reading, and music I was listening to - and asked questions about what other people were doing.

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