Computers are your friend, trust computers

        This was going to be a report of Stabcon. But it isn't now.
        At home I have two computers. One is an old Amiga (A500, 1.5MB RAM,
20MB hard disk - and that hard disk cost me œ185 not that many years ago) and
the other is a duff old PC. I got the PC about two years ago second-hand for
about œ185. It's a 286 with 2MB + 640KB of RAM, a not-super VGA monitor, and
a 170MB hard disk. It doesn't run Windows, and I do everything in DOS on it.
        The hard disk, which I paid an extra 50 pounds or so for, has loads
of bad sectors, which mean I get rather more, irritating, "Abort, Retry,
Ignore, Fail" errors than I would like. I was using SCANDISK to detect and
isolate these bad sectors (all 11MB of them and counting! More every day!)
for about the 30th time, a process which takes 20-60 minutes and 5-500 presses
of the space bar at the right times. So, I was writing my review of Stabcon
on my Amiga. I also have a slightly nicer text editor for my Amiga than the
one I use on my PC - "good" old MS-DOS EDIT.
        I have a modem and an account with Demon Internet, too, which I use
to check my e-mail (most of which is still coming to the university). The
modem will work with both the Amiga and the PC, though it won't do everything
I'd want it to with either one. Until recently, I had to go through the very
charming routine of connecting to the Demon service with my PC to collect any
mail (80% of which was unsolicited commercial junk, like adverts for US
psychic lines) waiting at my Demon account, then connecting again with my
Amiga which could actually properly handle the telnet software needed for me to
check my e-mail at the university. For if any mail came through to my Demon
account while I was connected to my university account using my Amiga (deep
breath), then the system would moan and I would have to start all over again.
        So there was a lot of changing the lead between computer and modem
over from PC to Amiga, Amiga to PC and so on. The night before last, my mind
in a blur about all the things that had to be done and GITs that had to be
written, I took the wrong end of the cable out accidentally, and wound up
inadvertently trying to connect to Demon from my PC using not my modem but
instead my Amiga's parallel port.
        My Amiga didn't like that. It won't work any more.
        So-o-o-o, I can't get to things stored on my Amiga's hard drive. Like
my already-written quite-good-though-I-do-say-so-myself Stabcon report. And
as I don't fancy typing it all out again, there won't be a Stabcon report.
(Well, I'm going to try and get my Amiga fixed at some point, then I might be
able to air my review to the world. However, this relies on me not having
fried my hard drive as well, and it was making some fairly suspicious and
unpleasant grinding noises which it shouldn't do, so all bets are off.)
        I've been lucky with my Amiga. It has lasted me for the best part of
seven years. This is an absolute eternity in computing terms. During those
eighty months it has not broken down once, which is fairly exceptional as
these things go. Before my Amiga, I had (and still have, working, though the
power supply is dodgy) a Spectrum, which was my main computer for, again,
about eighty months. The keyboard membrane had to be replaced one on it, but
other than that, it's a trooper. It took a lickin' and kept on tickin'.
        Now, dear reader, what would you say the chances were of the next
computer I buy being able to last me for another eighty months?
        It is about time for a new computer. Really a computer is outdated
within two or three years from when you get it, and for the last few years of
my Spectrum and the last few years of my Amiga I was struggling on with it,
finding new software for the machine hard to come by, using them for very
simple not-state-of-the-art applications. With a PC, it'll be much worse.
Either I have to trade it in every two or three years, or I'll have to keep
updating it and bunging stuff it. This is a process that fills me with much
dread. I'm definitely of the school that gets a machine then makes it last
and last rather than fitting more and more to it, having heard horror stories.
        It's also depressing to note the cost trend. The Spectrum cost œ180
at the time, I believe. The Amiga package we got cost œ600. It's entirely
plausible that I would have to spend œ2000 or so for a PC with a chance of
keeping up with the times for a few (let alone seven!) years, a printer, and
a half-decent amount of software. And œ2000 is a lot of money.
        And it just somehow won't be as _nice_ as the Speccy or the Amiga...