|
|
|
SAGA OF THE 486By Francine Schwieder |
One pleasant summer evening, greeting fellow CHOMP board members in the parking lot, I was chatting with Jon Chaplin, our resident tech guru, as he was rummaging through the trunk of his car, and he pulled out what seemed to be the remains of a defunct computer. It had no case. There was a hole in front where the CD drive should be. It looked naked and pathetic, and it did not look like a Mac.
"Do you want it?" he asked suggestively.
"What is it?" I returned demurely.
"A 486 server junked by the ISP I used to work for. It has FreeBSD installed and an ethernet card."
Since it was free, and if I didn't take it, it would be used as an organ donor (not that it seemed to have many organs left to donate), I made a spur of the moment decision, out of a kind of pity. I wanted a linux box anyway, and I could experiment without fear of breaking something valuable, so, yes, I admit it, I took it. And thus it was that I came to own a non-Mac computer.
I grew quite fond of the 486 in just a week. I bought it a keyboard, a 3 button mouse, an AB switch. I installed a CDROM drive, which my brother had given me. I partitioned its drive with fdisk (this required a long distance phone call and coaching from my brother, the UNIX guru), I installed Red Hat Linux (twice), I got ethernet working and successfully transferred a file from the Mac to the 486. I bought a manual so I could perform proper maintenance and upgrades. I bought a 16MB RAM chip, installed it........and killed the computer. I felt like a murderer. It not only wouldn't start, it wouldn't even beep to say what was wrong. It seemed quite, quite dead.
[with sincere apologies to the spirit of Oscar Wilde]
Each one kills the thing they love
By none let this be missed;
The normal do it with a blow,
The techie with a chip.
Some kill their love when they are young
And some when they are old;
The bravest use a static charge
To make the chips grow cold.
Some kill their 'puter with a curse
And some without a word;
The saddest tried to make amends
And fried their motherboard.
Yes, each one kills the thing they love
Yet each one has not died;
The geeky tech on one hot day
Dripped sweat--her 'puter fried.
I never saw a woman look
With such a wistful gaze
Upon the blankness of a screen
That now is blank always.
In LA town, near San Berdoo,
There lies a pit of shame,
And in it lies a motherboard
That never had a name.
For she had killed the thing she loved,
Meaning well or ill,
So now her monitor is blank
And all the chips are still.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the Theory of the Natural Perverseness of the Universe, in which Murphy's Law is one consequence ("If something can go wrong, it will" and variations on this theme, such as "The bread always falls butter side down"). So having taken the time to write a poem about killing the 486, and having received plaudits for same from several people, naturally the last time I fired up the 486 before scrapping its motherboard, it.....beeped! Like Dr. Frankenstein I found myself exclaiming:
"IT'S ALIIIIVVVE! IT'S ALIVE!"
Now this was especially amazing as I had totally disassembled the machine, believing it to be quite dead, and committed such atrocities as trying to pry the heat sink off the CPU (I thought there might be something interesting underneath, see illustration above, with the CPU fan attached to the heatsink, which is glued to the CPU). I wasn't grounded. I handled all sorts of crucial parts after walking across the carpet. I then reassembled it, left out a couple of parts I thought irrelevant, and pressed power-on one last time. And it beeped. Of course the hard drive didn't spin up, the light on the floppy drive didn't glow, and the monitor remained dark, but it beeped! The motherboard was not fried after all. Thus encouraged I tinkered with it some more and eventually got everything to work (the poor thing believed the date to be January 1, 1995 but such confusion can be forgiven, considering the abuse it had been subjected to; it could also be corrected in the BIOS thingy, by resetting the CMOS what's-it). Mirabile dictu, it now actually works *better* than it did before. The RAM I bought is recognized. The LILO boot function for Linux is now recognized and operative. I cannot account for this miraculous resurrection, except by reference to some sort of interference with my karmic relations with inanimate objects by the good vibrations resulting from the sympathy my mournful poem evoked. Furthermore this karmic distortion even resulted in another, and quite unrelated, miracle of inanimate healing--
The evening when I was struggling to put the 486 together again I was also watering the lawn. I went out to turn the water off and noticed that the sprinkler head nearest the driveway was leaking, not drops of water but a veritable trickle. It was nearly dark so I decided to fix it in the morning. But in the morning the Resurrection of the 486 occurred and I got distracted. When, in the late afternoon, I resignedly went out to cope with the sprinkler head I discovered it was dry as the desert. No leak. Mysteriously fixed. What a strange place is this Perverse Universe.