Ode To My Pogo

I bought it in 2000. Agonized over the decision, actually. A thousand dollars was a lot (always is). But I'd just signed a contract (it'd turn into a three-title deal, ultimately) with Coriolis and I needed an additional test system.

This thing was loaded from the get-go. A 1GHz Athlon CPU. Half-gig of RAM. CD burner. Twin 7200 RPM IDE HDs. A 128MB ATI All In Wonder Radeon card. Sweet.

The power supply went bad in 2002. Filled my office with dense acrid white smoke. Smelled like burnt metal for a week. Later the CPU fan would die. More than one hard disk died in this system.

I'll always remember reinstalling a new drive on September 11, 2001 after riding my LeMond home early from work (it was a bright beautiful blue Tuesday). My wife met me at the door and passed me a new hard drive that had arrived that morning (moments after the WTC was struck). Disturbing television coverage played in the background as I fired up Fdisk, partitioned the new drive and sat through yet another Windows install.

Diablo I and II helped pass anxious moments in 2001 (Dave Matthews played a post 9-11 charity concert as this PC fired up the American Red Cross donation site), layoff worries in 2002, the loss and arrival of loved ones in 2003, a burgeoning freelance business in 2004; you name it, I have history with this beige box.

Several upgrades saw added RAM, bigger disks, a DVD burner and more. This system, originally loaded with Red Hat 5 (I think it was) ran Windows 2000 betas (client and server), Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core Linux, Windows XP and even Windows Small Business Server in its late age.

But it began to slow. The Exchange store became corrupted. I couldn't add users. It'd reboot on its own.

The time had come. The Pogo was decommissioned this week after six years of dedicated service. Replaced by a 64-bit system that's twice as fast at half the cost, this Pogo deserves to rest in peace. It served me well.