🚀 go-pugleaf

Mid-Month Ramble - May 2017

Ha! You didn't believe me when I wrote that I intended to make this a
recurring, monthly thing; well, I'm back. I honestly didn't think my
last maunder was worthy of any responses, but I guess talking about
the old times hit a chord; I'm not sure this month's blather will have
the same success. Not that will stop me, of course; blather is my
middle name...

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So this month, I'm talking upgrades; specifically, wedging on new bits
of hardware to make your computer run better. It's on my mind because
I just got a new video-card. There's a certain joy in getting new
hardware and watching as your PC - seemingly slow and sluggish - is
revitalized into a ravenous devourer of framerates. Even more than the
practical effects, I enjoy the act of the upgrade: the study to
determine if an upgrade is worth it, the anticipation of how the
upgrade will reinvigorate the computer, the challenge of the actual
installation, the worry that you may have fucked something up during
the installation or wasted your money when performance doesn't
improve, the joy when you realize performance /has/ improved, and even
the eventual disappointment that - though framerates are smoother -
the games are still pretty much the same. 


My first upgrade was adding a second hard-drive. No wait, that's not
true. More correctly, a new hard-drive was the first upgrade to an
*IBM/PC-compatible*; technically, my first hardware upgrade was adding
a mouse to my old Apple ][c. Yes, back in the day, a new mouse was
considered an actual upgrade. I don't even remember why I got the
mouse; it was probably in response to hype about how mouse-driven
computing was the new hotness. This was just after the first Macintosh
computers were released, so Graphic User Interfaces were all the rage
in tech-magazines and I am just as vulnerable to that sort of
circumspect advertisement as anyone else. But I can tell you that the
"disappointment" phase hit pretty quickly and pretty hard; the Apple
II mouse was a clumsy, uncomfortable soap-bar with almost no
application support and offered little improvement over the keyboard.
There had been a vague hope I might use the thing to draw images
directly in the computer - I'm a bit of scribbler in real life - but
as anyone who has used MS Paint can tell you, any skill in sketching
with pen-n-paper translates very poorly to mouse-n-screen. The mouse
was quickly relegated to a dusty corner of the computer desk and
rarely used after the first few days.


My second upgrade - also to the venerable Apple - was in pursuit of a
goal that has haunted me even longer than increased frame-rates: I
needed more storage. Of course back then, storage was counted in
kilobytes and utilized floppy-disks (except for those millionaires who
could afford that rare beast, the mythical Hard Disk Drive). So in
this particular instance, the upgrade was not directly adding storage
- the Apple II didn't have any - but instead helped optimize access to
said storage. More precisely, I added a second floppy-disk drive. Now
/there/ was a worthwhile investment; file-copies became a thousand
times more efficient; no longer did I have to alternately insert
source and destination disks! Oh, and the joy of loading a multi-disk
program; you could get into the program or disk in tens of seconds
instead of the usual minutes (I'm thinking of you Ultima V; that
sucker came on five double-sided disks!). These days I have a
half-dozen external drives hanging off my PC and I think half the
reason I do this is because it hearkens back to the joy I felt when my
little side-car Apple II floppy-disk drive proved such an effective
addition. 

After that, though, my upgrading days were on pause for a good while;
the Apple ][c wasn't really meant to be upgraded, as it lacked the
internal slots for new boards and there was only so much you could
plug into the serial ports in the back. Oh, there was a printer (an
ImageWriter II, a cranky beast with terrible output that served me
well for ten years) and a disappointing joystick that never stayed
center (a big black-n-red thing, it came with an autofire feature that
didn't work in any of the games I owned and a little red screwdriver
used to manually tighten its springs; though the stick is long gone, I
still own that screwdriver to this day) but that's pretty much it.


But then I got a PC.


Coming from the Apple II, I had no issue with PCs of the late '80s and
early '90s. Yes, compared to some of its contemporaries it lacked
decent visuals and sound; yes, it had a gawd-awful memory system, and
yes, its interface could make grown men cry. But pretty much all that
could have been said about the Apple II too, so in every respect I saw
my PC as a huge improvement. So I wasn't upgrading my PC because I saw
it as deficient in anyway; I upgraded because - awesome as it was - I
could make it better. And that was just an amazing and mind-blowing
concept.

I actually stated above that my first PC-upgrade was to add a second
hard-drive. On recollection, I am not sure this is true (my memory is
spotty). The first upgrade may actually have been the addition of a
sound card; I'm not sure. But they came fairly close together in any
event and I intend to discuss both. But first that hard-drive.

That original PC had an immensely huge hard-drive; I forget exactly
the size but was either 80 or 100 megabytes. Coming from a computer
where I had to squeeze files onto 160 kilobyte floppy disks, this
seemed an immense and endless space, one that I'd never manage to
fill. I think it took me six months. At that point I was starting to
archive stuff back to floppies, and I was like, "This is ridiculous;
this is the sort of thing I would do on an Apple!". I concluded that I
had to consider alternatives. My first option was just to buy a new
computer; after all, that was the sort of thing you had to do in the
'80s when your old machine no longer met your needs. But then I
thought, "Wait, couldn't I just add another hard-drive?"

I should mention that at the time I was technically inept. I had no
experience and confidence with electronics; I dreaded working with the
innards of any machine, much less anything as technical and
cutting-edge as an early 90s computer! I am also the sort of person
who invariably manages to touch a live wire, and I've had more than a
few painful shocks that have made me wary of dealing with anything
with current (to this day, I always double-, triple- and
quadruple-check to make sure I've yanked all the power cords from a
computer before I open it, and even then I might wait a few hours or
days for the capacitors to drain first. Shock me once, shame on me;
shock me twenty times, and I'm gonna start being really careful ;-).

So installing a hard-drive seemed a daunting challenge, especially in
the days before easy access to the Internet how-to videos. Plus, this
was an era of DIP-switches, jumpers and where third-party interface
cards were necessary even to plug in a hard-drive. But the box - big,
red and with Maxtor prominently embossed on the front - promised it
was an "easy upgrade", and - with some perseverance (and much
swearing) I eventually doubled my storage capacity.

I swore I'd never do THAT again. Ha.


One more story; this one of my sound-card upgrade. This one was
notable in that it was the first one I really planned, as opposed to
doing almost on the spur of the moment. I did RESEARCH first, trying
to figure out which was the best purchase and what exactly such an
upgrade would entail. Of course, most of this research consisted on
reading advertising copy in magazines and on the boxes in stores, but
such was the time we lived in; no Internet, after all. 

Even more than the hard-drive, sound card installation was a trial.
With the hard-drive, I could pretty much just blindly follow
instructions to move DIP-switch #20 to position-1, but with the sound
card - a MediaVision Thunderboard, an 8-bit knock-off of the original
Soundblaster - I had to know and understand things like IRQ and DMA
settings, not to mention brave the depths of CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT. I probably learned more about PC architecture during
that one installation than I have since. 

And ohmigosh, the results; music! Moreso, music that actually sounded
like music; not the ear-piercing screeches that came from the internal
1-bit speaker. These days we're spoiled with digital recordings of
real orchestras that sound better coming from our 7.1 speakers than
they do in real life, but none of it compares to the magical tinny
MIDI soundtracks that were being piped out of my $5 speakers that were
originally used on my Sony Walkman. Here was an upgrade that was truly
worth all the heart-ache. I hadn't fried my motherboard with some
errant jumper setting, I hadn't electrocuted myself, I had installed
the thing correctly and learned a ton about computers, and I
considered not a dollar mis-spent in the purchase. It was the perfect
install, with none of the disappointment that usually settles in
later. 

(Well, at least not until I learned about the CreativeLabs
SoundBlaster Pro. But by then I was not only confident I could install
the damn thing, I was eager to do so).

Later upgrades have sort of blended together and anyway, I don't want
to bore you with a shot-by-shot recollection of every new device. For
a good while, it was mostly new sound-cards and hard-drives, with the
occasional modem or CD-ROM. In the mid-90s, video-cards started
gaining precedence as the upgrade-to-have, starting with VLB cards and
culminating in the 3D accelerators that drain our wallets to this day.
Later I'd venture into the challenge of RAM, motherboard and processor
installation, finally building my own computer from scratch. 

But even as I grew more comfortable with the art, it became less
fulfilling, partly because maturing technology made it so much easier.
Plug-n-play architecture meant I rarely had to worry that some new
device was going to brick my precious device; better designs made it
impossible to plug something in the wrong way (I'm still terrified -
arguably without cause - of applying some inadvertent electro-shock
therapy however). The sheer technical elegance and capability of
modern machines also make upgrading less necessary; at the height of
my fascination, I was probably applying some new upgrade every three
months or so; these days I can go years before cracking open the case.
So it's not really the same. Yet even today, when I install some new
device, I can still recall the same frisson of excitement that has
thrilled me since those heady days when a second floppy drive or a new
sound-card was a monumental improvement.