A Tale of Two Pentiums

Pictured: a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT. Unexplained: a pear.

I've always been around computers since I was born, and I was always getting into trouble with them. From repeatedly pressing the reset button to using up an entire colour inkjet cartridge by printing one picture repeatedly, it wasn't too long before my parents broke down and let me have a computer of my own - but the one rule was that if I messed it up, I would have to take responsibility for getting it fixed. And so the tale begins with a Toshiba Satellite and memories of eBay.

When my parents decided to get me a computer, I only had $20 to work with. I was only allowed one hour of computer usage a day, so I would fill that entire hour by looking on eBay for a computer of my own and by going to IBM's website and drooling over the ThinkPad T40, all on a 56k dial-up connection. I had decided that I wanted a laptop because it was portable and I could take it anywhere I wanted to.

I remember those days of one-hour eBay searches quite well, and they were also back in the day when a Pentium computer would sell anywhere from $10 to $50 instead of the $200 minimum they now fetch. I looked at all different brands of laptops and I even thought about getting an early ThinkPad but decided against it because it had no CD-ROM drive. Eventually, I settled on a Toshiba Satellite 200CDT which was very similar to the Satellite Pro pictured above. It was cheap and it had a CD-ROM drive, so what did I have to lose? A couple weeks later, it came in the mail.

Here it was: A computer all for me, that I didn't have to share with anyone and could change the settings however I wanted. It was an exciting time and I tore into it, doing every little thing I could think of doing and trying out everything that was in my copies of Windows 95 Bible and More Windows 95 for Dummies, including trying out the famous credits screen easter egg. Seeing what had been left behind was fun too, as it was upgraded to Windows 95 from MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. The install of Windows 3.1 was long gone, even though its boot option still remained on the boot screen but all of the MS-DOS tools were still there and I would spend as much time as I could in QBASIC and the DOS Shell. If that wasn't enough, I would sometimes set it on top of my dresser and give lectures on computing to my army of plushies.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. When my dad brought home some CDs marked "Windows NT Workstation 4.0," I had to try them out. And so I put in the CD, deleted Windows 95 and promptly got stuck because it was asking for "Boot 1" and I didn't know what it wanted at the time. Not long after that, the computer went completely cold and never turned on again. I later learned that the motherboard had cracked and it was impossible to repair, so naturally I tore the whole thing down to bits to see what was inside.

Fortunately, my father had gotten a Dell Optiplex from work that he was using as his computer, so he gave me his old PC: a Pentium 166 that his brother had built. I set about making it my own, but this time I had Windows 98 and many more cool things to do with it. Even more fun was when my father let me play a game called MechWarrior 3, a game where you pilot a giant robot and blow up other giant robots. The computer was barely able to run it and it had no 3D accelerator so the game ran pretty poorly, but I was able to complete the entire game on it. Later, my father drilled holes in the ceiling and ran a network cable from my room to the living room so we could play deathmatch games, and I got so good on my underpowered Pentium that I could consistently beat him.

That computer also suffered a similar fate to the Satellite. One day, I was playing around with some parts my grandfather gave to me and when I went to turn the computer back on, it no longer came up or gave any beep codes. I can only assume that in my youthful carelessness, I zapped the motherboard with some static electricity. But all was well as I got another old computer to play with; a story for another time.

I wish I still had the hard drives to those computers. I think they got lost when we moved.