Why? Why on Earth?? When I have so many other things around the house that need doing.

So I’ve been doing some “downsizing” here at Casa del Garrett, mostly getting off of old computer manuals and documentation I will never need again (these go to recycling so at least the paper can have another life), plus some other items in my extensive (not kidding) library that I will probably never read again, and don’t seem likely to ever be reference material. I’m still trying to find a second hand book repository for these.

It began when I had to buy a new furnace/AC unit and had to move around a bunch of furniture for the contractors to work. That gave me an opportunity to clean in places that are otherwise hard to get at. In addition I had a duct cleaning done, which had probably not ever been done since the house was built, judging by what the duct cleaners found. So I had to move around a bunch of other furniture too. 

Before putting it all back, I decided to use the opportunity to do a little downsizing. The fact is I have too much Stuff. I’ve lived in this house since the summer of 2001, but moved into it with a lot of stuff I’d accumulated over the years. Much of that, like my hand and power tools, and all my spare parts, proved to be even more useful when owning a house than they were when I was living in apartments and the basement of friends. But I’d also managed to collect a pretty large library of books and LPs…a fact the movers probably didn’t appreciate since both are very heavy when boxed up. And I was already loaded with computer stuff, since I was by then making a living as a software engineer, which was what enabled me to buy a house of my own in the first place. And before that I was into computers partly as hobby, partly as a means of communicating over a modem. When I discovered modems and BBSs I dove into it. That led me to volunteering on a local gay BBS, and that led me to my first jobs writing software.

Which brings me to this. It’s an IBM PS2 Model 80…the top of the PS2 line once upon a time. My first big W-2 software gig was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services, which was an exclusively IBM worksite The big iron downtown was all IBM, and in the offices where I worked everything on the desktops was a PS2…usually a model 50. or 55. So when I came across this model 80 for sale at a computer flea market years later, I was already pretty familiar with them. 

Poor thing has just sat in my basement storage area for over a decade, beside an Apple PowerMac G5 I bought for the art room and eventually replaced with an Intel based Mac Pro. As I began deciding what to downsize around here, I looked at both of those computers and the space they were taking up. It seemed ridiculous to just be holding onto them when I knew I’d probably never need either one ever again. But I didn’t want to just take them to the city recycling place. This wasn’t like giving up an old VCR or TV…both those machines were the top of their lines back in the day. I knew some collector would want them both. But how to find them good homes? 

And the more I thought about the PS2, the more I remembered the days of DOS and how the advent of the personal computer seemed to open up fantastic new worlds…worlds which, surprisingly I found I could navigate pretty easily. I didn’t have a college degree in computer science and wasn’t likely to ever get one since I had no money for college. No matter in retrospect. Computer logic just seemed to click with me.

Long before that first job, and those first days volunteering at G.L.I.B. (The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau) I discovered I could build my own IBM PC compatible from parts. There was no way I could afford an actual IBM PC, but I could buy a part here and a part there until I had all that I needed. I remember after I built that first IBM compatible and got it to boot, just sitting on the edge of my bed staring at the monitor with it’s 640k memory test still on the screen and an ‘A’ prompt (that first computer initially booted PC-DOS from a floppy disk) and looking at the blinking caret in something like awe. Until that moment my computer was a little Commodore C64. Now I had a Serious computer…and IBM no less. Well…a pretty good copy since it booted genuine PC-DOS, not the more generic MS-DOS. This was no toy. This was International Business Machines serious business. I sat there for I don’t know how long stunned at the awesome computing power I suddenly had at my control. What have I got myself into…

Well…what I’d got myself into, though I didn’t know it then, was a career that would pull me out of near poverty and eventually into the space program. Walt Disney was fond of saying his success story all began with a mouse. Well mine began with a boot to DOS. And I rode it all the way to the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Operations Center and Integration and Test Lab.

So that PS2 machine had more of my life wrapped up in it than the PowerMac by light years. I began to wonder if I could just find a place for it in my den where I could work on it again as a kind of hobby.

I tried booting it the other day and it threw a couple error codes that I needed to look up, but I was pretty sure what they were. The PS2s need a small internal battery to maintain their configuration memory and the one in mine had likely died many years ago. It’s a simple fix…replace the battery and boot with the configuration disk and restore your configuration. But while Googling the error codes I discovered there are hobbyists out there who love to work on these machines. And they know where you can get parts. So that notion of keeping the PS2 as a hobby became lots more attractive.

So I got it running again and I’m just going to let it run for now and see what I can make of it. See if I can give the PowerMac to a good home later. 

And try to get all my other stuff around the house done. I still have a lot of Stuff to sort through and decide what to get off of, and what to keep. It’s going to take weeks, but I’m 70, on retirement income, and I need to simplify.