I've been experiencing retro computer shock for the past week or so.  I've had to jump down from my high horse of a Pentium 4 CPU with oodles of RAM and broadband to a Pentium 2 machine originally built in 1996.  It had only 32 MB of RAM and Windows 95 for an operating system, but a few years ago when I parents were using it as their computer I upped the RAM an additional 128 MB and updated the machine to Windows 98.  There's no place for the network cable to connect, so I'm stuck with old fashioned dial-up Internet.  The USB ports do not work.  The video card cannot exceed a resolution of 1024 x 768 without locking the machine up.  In fact, Windows 98 consumes all of the system RAM just by running.  Toss in a web browser and the whole system becomes terribly slow and unstable.  It takes me nearly thirty minutes just to boot the machine, dial into the Internet, and check my e-mail.

My fancy computer is on its way home this week after a brief stay at the repair center.  I cannot wait to restore it to its place of honor in my home.  The temp computer is unsuitable for just about everything beyond a game of Freecell (and even that lags somewhat).  I miss my fast Internet, my games, my music, my ability to watch DVDs in the bedroom, and the system stability required to write articles of a decent length.  In the meantime I'm stuck in a 2006 world with a 1996 computer, and believe me when I say that I now understand that not all retro hardware needs to be preserved for future generations.  Somehow I doubt that people in the year 2030 will want to play Freecell on Windows 98.