Tuesday 4 June 2002

Pic of the day: Isn't it cute?

A different HP love story

You know you've read waayyy too much Harry Potter girly fanfic when you think you see Ginny Weasley walking down the street in your town ... and your heart makes a jump. Yes, it happened to me some days ago; and then I bought Morrowind.

But my first HP love story was not Harry Potter but Hewlett-Packard. It is twenty years ago, but I still remember my HP-41C.

***

At mercantile high school I had met my first computer and found out that I was unusually gifted in programming. But then I left school and got a job in a rather backwards branch of the bureaucracy. It wasn't just that we didn't have computers: Even our calculators had handles that we turned repeatedly for multiplication. This was around 1980, in one of the world's most advanced nations. I was not impressed. I could not afford my own computer, but I could (barely) afford a programmable calculator.

And not just any calculator. I don't remember just how much was in the original and how much in the plug-in modules, but in the end it had both text and graphics and I carried around a small printer with it. It was my first real computer, and my first handheld computer too. They say that your first love leaves a mark on you for life ... and it may be the same here.

This was at the time when HP prided themselves in their extreme quality. Their products were made to last for at least 20 years, so they said. Eventually they were to discover that this approach makes no sense in the computer business, where a model is unsellable in 3 years and obsolete in 5. But my HP-41 lasted and lasted. Eventually I sold it.

My next HP was a HP-71B. This was even more of a handheld computer and even less of a calculator. It even had a tiny QWERTY keyboard, and came with an extensive BASIC. Later I bought a Forth & assembler module. I had a network at home with various gadgets, including a green monitor and a printer. This too lasted and lasted, though I had to get it repaired after it spent a train trip soaked in Cola. When I blew it a last time (put in batteries wrong way) it was so obsolete and PCs so cheap that I never had it fixed again.

Since then I haven't had a HP. Well, a Deskjet printer, but that's different; besides, I rarely print at home. (Not quite every year.)

***

But as a Norwegian saying goes: "Old flame flickers the longest." And so I have once again a Hewlett-Packard machine in the household, a cute laptop. With a gigahertz processor and 256 MB RAM it should be able to do anything except high-end games. The screen actually looks crisper and sharper than my regular monitor, and updates immediately. Sometime during the last 3 years, LCD technology must have crossed some kind of threshold, because the old Toshiba's display was clearly inferior.

Regular readers will remember that I had two laptops already, sort of. The old Toshiba was a Monday machine which I would have returned if not for the fact that I needed it from day 1. It runs modern software slowly or not at all. After it fell and struck its head, it has problems with defragmenting and with connecting to the Internet. (Which was rather taxing at the best of times with 32 MB RAM.)

The second laptop resides with my best friend. I'm sure regular readers remember her too. :) Now there won't be any pressure on her to bring it back. I'm sure her husband, when that time comes, will provide adequate computing power and make sure my Toshiba 2 comes home. I know human males. He won't stand for her using my stuff. She may think of me as an older brother or something, but the husband won't. Not for a while at least. I'm not a person very easy to believe in.

But it doesn't seem to happen this summer either. Perhaps.