It started as I was thinking about my car, how long I've had it and how long I expect to have it. If I remember correctly, I got it in March of '04, which is now 5 1/2 years ago (seems like only 2, honestly). 66 months, 102,000 miles. That's about 1545 miles per month. Assuming I'm going to run this thing out until 450,000 - a very reasonable idea considering it's the diesel model, that means I'm going to have this car for about another 19 years. By that point, my kids might (probably) be driving it. Which got me to thinking... I miss cars that came with instructions. I'm not talking about the driver's manual. I'm talking about the kind of instructions I have received (and given) when borrowing/lending an older vehicle. Cars nowadays are a highly computerized ballet of wondrous technology. But for all anyone but your mechanic is concerned, they might as well work on pixie dust and magic blue smoke (I am of course referring to the magic blue smoke that is contained in all electronic devices which allows them to run - let it out and they don't work anymore, and not my tailpipe emissions). Older cars were different. I'm not an automotive wizard by any means, but when I really needed to figure out how to fix my old Scirocco, well, I could. And by the time they got to me, cars like that were a highly complex ballet of workarounds, jury rigs and and "duct tape and bailing wire". The kind of cars that came with a 5 minute rundown of things to expect - something along the lines of "To start it, make sure these three switches and the radio are flipped off, the heater fan set to medium, pump the gas three times and then turn the ignition." I remember getting one such speech when I borrowed my former roommate Richard's truck to go to Home Depot - a 1 and a half mile round trip. Cars of yesteryear were relatively simple machines. My Scirocco had mechanical ignition, was pretty advanced for the time because it had electronic fuel injection, but really that was the only thing on the whole car that was computerized. All the blinkers and sensors were really as simple as you can get them, with just board of capacitors, resistors and relays to make everything work. Even the EFI computer could be replaced by crude electronics if you really needed to. It got me to thinking about how today's cars are going to age. In twenty years, are the people who are still driving today's cars going to have permanent mini computers hooked up to the OBDII ports just so they can fiddle with injection timing and exhaust ratios, just to keep it running on the road? Will I even be able to buy diesel that will work in my car anymore, or will I have to spend my weekends separating used fryer grease that I got from one of the two remaining local restaurants that hasn't been sued and regulated into getting rid of their fryers? What exactly is driving my car twenty years from now entail? Are our advancements in technology putting a premature cap on the useful life of our vehicles? You can right now take a car from the 1930s, and with some machining, hard work and a basic mechanical knowledge get it running and drivable, assuming you know where to find parts. Will anyone feel that same nostalgia for my 2003 Jetta in 2085 that so many people today have for say an old Duesenberg?
This brings me to my other thought. What defines usable life? Don't get me wrong... I'm certainly one who likes to have the newest, fastest, shiniest gadget or gizmo, but really, what is our need to have the next best thing when what we have works? In some cases, it is truly about saving time. I upgraded my computer from a bound-for-recycling PowerMac G4 that I got from work to a Quad Core, 2.66Ghz Xeon Mac Pro because as I've been getting more serious about my photography, I needed something that would be able to handle me throwing several hundred 12MB Camera RAW files at it at once, without taking 2 days to do it. I've certainly enjoyed the other perks that have come with it - faster internet browsing, more storage capacity (1.75 TB!), modern games, but honestly for the majority of what I spend time doing - email and browsing the web, that old G4 was fine. I few weeks back my dad gave me an old PowerBook 145b. 25 Mhz processor, 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive. After an hour or so of use, the old passive matrix screen on it starts to get too ghosted to be really usable, but it runs Word 5.1, Excel and a handful of old but fun games (YAY FOR TETRIS!) really well. It boots in less than a minute, and is perfectly "usable" if you want a machine to write on. Honestly it may even be better than my new fancy Mac Pro because it simply doesn't have all the distractions that modern computers do. Once the adapter arrives in the mail, I'll be able to access online content, but not much of today's web will display on Netscape 1.0, so really "online" will just mean downloading disk images of System Software from Apple and sharing files across the local network (I wonder if I can rig it to print to my inkjet... probably not). But wait, my Pro is running Snow Leopard, which seems to have officially dropped support for LocalTalk. So what to do? What any reasonable hoarder of stuff like myself would do, pick up an old free iMac to act as an intermediary file sharing storage black hole. It sure doesn't hurt that it comes with Office, Photoshop (4.0), Quark 4.1 (the last decent version, IMHO), and a handful of other features I miss about using Classic. Though, if I'm brutally honest, in terms of speed and distraction free usability, nothing beats System 6 in the Mac world, which is why once I get this fun little network up and running, I plan to add in my very first computer, the wonderful little Mac SE, which also has Word 5.1 (which I can't stress enough, is simply the best version there is) and runs almost all the same games and programs of the PowerBook. Hopefully I can find a good Apple Extended II (clicky) keyboard with it's beautiful mechanical keyswitches that are just awesome for typing. Then I'll have my happy (if not bizarre) little Mac lab with everything from the 8Mhz SE to the Pro... with a processor a whopping 1,361.92 times faster.
Neat.
This brings me to my other thought. What defines usable life? Don't get me wrong... I'm certainly one who likes to have the newest, fastest, shiniest gadget or gizmo, but really, what is our need to have the next best thing when what we have works? In some cases, it is truly about saving time. I upgraded my computer from a bound-for-recycling PowerMac G4 that I got from work to a Quad Core, 2.66Ghz Xeon Mac Pro because as I've been getting more serious about my photography, I needed something that would be able to handle me throwing several hundred 12MB Camera RAW files at it at once, without taking 2 days to do it. I've certainly enjoyed the other perks that have come with it - faster internet browsing, more storage capacity (1.75 TB!), modern games, but honestly for the majority of what I spend time doing - email and browsing the web, that old G4 was fine. I few weeks back my dad gave me an old PowerBook 145b. 25 Mhz processor, 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive. After an hour or so of use, the old passive matrix screen on it starts to get too ghosted to be really usable, but it runs Word 5.1, Excel and a handful of old but fun games (YAY FOR TETRIS!) really well. It boots in less than a minute, and is perfectly "usable" if you want a machine to write on. Honestly it may even be better than my new fancy Mac Pro because it simply doesn't have all the distractions that modern computers do. Once the adapter arrives in the mail, I'll be able to access online content, but not much of today's web will display on Netscape 1.0, so really "online" will just mean downloading disk images of System Software from Apple and sharing files across the local network (I wonder if I can rig it to print to my inkjet... probably not). But wait, my Pro is running Snow Leopard, which seems to have officially dropped support for LocalTalk. So what to do? What any reasonable hoarder of stuff like myself would do, pick up an old free iMac to act as an intermediary file sharing storage black hole. It sure doesn't hurt that it comes with Office, Photoshop (4.0), Quark 4.1 (the last decent version, IMHO), and a handful of other features I miss about using Classic. Though, if I'm brutally honest, in terms of speed and distraction free usability, nothing beats System 6 in the Mac world, which is why once I get this fun little network up and running, I plan to add in my very first computer, the wonderful little Mac SE, which also has Word 5.1 (which I can't stress enough, is simply the best version there is) and runs almost all the same games and programs of the PowerBook. Hopefully I can find a good Apple Extended II (clicky) keyboard with it's beautiful mechanical keyswitches that are just awesome for typing. Then I'll have my happy (if not bizarre) little Mac lab with everything from the 8Mhz SE to the Pro... with a processor a whopping 1,361.92 times faster.
Neat.
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