I’ve melted down my computer. It took some time, but I finally did it.
I’ve been a Mac user since 1990. Now don’t go getting all upset because I use Apple instead of a PC. Back then I was a graphic designer, and my industry was changing rapidly. Gone were the days of using tracing paper and markers. The Mac II, which came with millions of colors, was now the industry standard. They were the only computers capable of creating graphics. The Windows operating system hadn’t been invented yet. IBM and other personal computers ran on the DOS operating system.
I remember the day my computer arrived. It was big, it was heavy, and with the scanner and printer it cost about the same as a used compact car. (Cars were so much cheaper back then.) It also came with a 40 megabyte hard drive, which was huge. People asked me what was I going to do with all that disk space? Software came in a box. Inside the box were floppy disks. CD roms would come along a few years later. Thumb drives were either on someone’s drawing board, or they hadn’t been thought of yet.
The Internet, as we know it today, wasn’t available. In fact, I didn’t start hearing about the Internet until the mid-1990s. It required a dial up modem and you connected to it through your phone lines. As in your land lines. Cell phones were around, but they were bulky and expensive and very few people had them. We’ve certainly come a long way, haven’t we?
So fast forward to today. I’m using a MacBook Pro that’s ten times more efficient than that old Mac II, and it cost a fraction of the price. Photography is another of my life’s passions, and just like computers, digital cameras have come a long way. I loved my old Nikkormat 35mm SLR camera, and I used it for decades. However film, and film processing, is expensive. I can do so much more with a DSLR, and unlike a negative, digital photos don’t deteriorate. They do, however, take up an awful lot of disc space. So much so that I’ve overloaded my computer.
The cloud is problematic as I prefer to open my files from within the application, but it doesn’t work when the file you need is in the cloud. Having to stop and download files from the cloud interferes with my workflow. And even after moving as many files as I could to my external drive, it just wasn’t enough. I no longer have enough disc space to launch Adobe InDesign or Photoshop. So do I feel sad? Heck no! I means I’ve worked hard enough to melt down my computer.
My new MacBook comes with a 1 terabyte hard drive, and it’ll be here in about a week. I wonder how long it will take me to fill up a terabyte? Such is the life of a novel writer, who also does photography.
Marina Martindale