esrblog was guest-of-honor at MacHack in 2000, the conferees took up a collection and bought him an iBook. One of the old ones, half-frosted white, half bright primary colors, shaped somewhat like a toilet seat, It ran MacOS 9.1.Since
esrblog didn't really want to use a Mac for anything serious, the machine became mine. It lived on a corner of the desk in my room, and we would play games on it. Freeware or shareware games; Spaceward Ho! Bubble Trouble, Snood, Risk, even Civilization II.Gradually, the machine became decrepit. The battery stopped recharging, and since it was just a games machine, it didn't seem to be worth the $150 or so it would have taken to replace it. The time reading stopped matching the real world. It complained more when power was cut off and rebooting occurred. A cat we tried (unsuccessfully) to adopt scratched a few of the keys off of the keyboard. But we still used it, periodically, as a game machine, and so did some of our guests.
Last night, the machine started buzzing quietly, and the screen began to flicker in an ominous way. I tried to reboot the machine, but the screen only flickered, and stayed mostly dark.
esrblog tried the same thing, just now, with even less result. So our "game" machine is gone. No more Bubble Trouble, Spaceward Ho!, or Snood, unless they get ported to Android.
Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal to you, but coming on the heels of everything else I lost in 2012, it feels like an ominous reminder that You Can't Go Back. Worse, it feels as though everything I enjoyed over the past decade is gone for good, that there are only grimmer times to look to ahead.
That's silly, I know. My husband is fine. My cat, elderly as she is, is with us still. I have my home, my friends, my health. I just hate to lose the old things that gave me pleasure, and that reminded me of happy times.