Neil Fein's Blog

Hard to believe the first month of summer is almost over. Lessee, what happened this month:

We visited my in-laws, and found out they were on a game show, in the 60's. Started listening to Sweeney Todd a lot, in particular on the way to and back from my ASQ exam -- which I passed!

I resumed playing tennis, and tried to get a tennis club going. (It's not doing that well at the moment, due to lack of participation.) Had a Star Wars party, where we made fun of Episode IV mercilessly. Many folks didn't show, and I had my yearly bout of I-have-no-friends sickness. Kinda like junior high school.

I found a home for my old computer. Also wrote a new song, using a friend's blog post as inspiration, thoroughly freaking her out in the process. I think. The post wasn't about anything personal, but still... I can get creepy when I get into song mode, I know that.

There's an empty spot on the floor of my studio. I've finally found a home for my beloved Power Computing PowerTower Pro clone. I wasn't sure if I'd find someone who was looking to run older software, even though it runs it excellently. In a time where machines last three or four years, I used it for almost a decade!

In 1995, I had been using my aging Mac IIcx for far too long. It was running a system that was too slow for it ("officially unsupported" by Apple), couldn't properly address more than 8mb of RAM (at least not without Mode 32, if anyone remembers that clever little program).

It was clearly time to get a new Mac. This was the era of clones, when Jobs was on the outs from Apple (he was off with NeXT building grayscale machines for academic types) and Copland was the shining hope of the hopefully-not-too-distant-future. Getting a non-Apple machine appealed to my sense of contrariness, and it was the best computer buying decision I ever made. My PTP served me well with systems 7.5 through 9.1., through two jobs, two marriages and three apartments.

I eventually replaced it, when I needed to run OSX to get a hard-disk recording thing off the ground -- when my minidisc multitracker died, it clinched this. My mother-in-law came to the rescue with a G3 Mac as a temporary replacement, and I soon bought a G5 iMac. But the PowerTower Pro sat on my floor, as I couldn't bear to just throw it in the trash or stash it in a closet.

The FrankenMac (as Bruce calls it, as it has room for any internal peripheral you could imagine) is now with David, who's upgrading from a Mac 7100. (The PTP has ended up with a G3, a gig of RAM, and 36 gigs of hard drive space.)

Last night after dinner, I gave him a guided tour of the innards of the machine in case he ever felt the need to poke around. But he'll be using it for basic MIDI sequencing, in addition to word processing and email and such.

I used that computer for just under a decade, and I'm glad someone can use it now (as opposed to it ending up in a landfill somewhere).