The Evolution of Mr. Wizard...in pictures

Herman, 286 10MHz
(1994-1995)

I acquired Herman from my brother Jerry after he'd upgraded to a Pentium 90MHz (hey, that was state-of-the-art back in 1994). Hermie actually ran Windows 3.1 thanks to a fast SCSI hard drive (all 420mb of the little bugger). Granted, with a clock speed of only 10 MHz, Hermie crashed Word 2.0 from time to time -- still, he got the job done. Crashes were minimized when Jerry created a batch file which ran Defrag at boot-up. Anyway, some of Hermie's peripherals, upon his untimely death, were passed on to what would become Mr. Wizard. It was quite a shock when I attempted to boot Hermie up one day and got a white screen. It wasn't the monitor -- the CPU had finally died. Oh well -- onto a faster machine...

Mr.Wizard, 486 80MHz DX2 (1995-1997)

Ah, at last speed and almost no crashes! I began with Windows 3.1, later upgraded to Win95 in October of 1995. It was with this machine that I finally got a modem (Hermie didn't have one). And, of course, I began with AOL (doesn't everyone?) as my first ISP. The first Web pages I visited: "The Spot" (which is no longer around) and The Dominion. Yes, I surfed my widdle heart out -- to the tune of $117 my first month on AOL. Errrgg! After a few months I switched to Netcom and got to experience the Web with a real browser, Netscape. Those were the days when AOL had their own crappy little browser which couldn't show backgrounds and wouldn't maximize to full screen. Eventually I outgrew my once-peppy 486 and Mr. Wizard reinvented himself again...

Mr. Wizard, 200 MHz Pentium w/MMX (1997-2000)

Oooohhhh babies, I was flyin' with this machine. By this time, I had already switched  ISPs three times (Znet and later GTE...finally frustrated with dial-up disconnects and bottlenecks, I switched to Cox@Home cable). You've probably noticed the Apple logo -- yes, I hope to add a Mac to my 'puter family -- a nice tower in "Graphite." No fruity colors for me, no sir. This does not mean that I will get rid of my Wintel machine -- I believe that Mr. Wizard will cohabit quite nicely with the future Mr. MacMerlin. Besides, they're both going to have to learn to share my USB scanner. Anyway, all good things must come to an end -- once again Mr. Wizard demanded another upgrade...

Mr. Wizard, 500 MHz PentiumIII w/MMX (2000-?)

And so it goes. What a journey: a 10 MHz 286 with 4 mb of RAM to a 500 MHz Pentium III with 128 mb of SDRAM PC-100! And who knows? Perhaps one day I'll have a picture of Mr. Wizard as a 1 or 2 GHz machine. For now, I'm very pleased with the performance of my Penty III -- Mr. Wizard can pretty much handle anything I throw at him...well...maybe I should re-phrase that...

A Mac has joined my 'puter family at last!

Yes, as of 9/23/02, I now have my very own Macintosh computer: a beautiful eMac. I have christened him MacMerlin (in keeping with the sorcerer theme, of course). He's running OS X, v10.2 (aka Jaguar) with 640mb of RAM. I think that'll do nicely. When I've matched all the software on my PC, this little Mac will become a graphics workhorse. But he's up to the challenge. Because...he is MacMerlin.

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Last update: 9/25/02