My most trusty digital workhorses

While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a gadget geek, I have amassed a not unimpressive amount of gear over the years and seen most of it fade into obsolescence.

Take the Psion 5 organizer. It was gorgeous. You could actually type on it with eight fingers and it fits in your jacket pocket. Just watching it slide open is techno-rapture. If I hadn't dropped it eight years ago and cracked the touch-screen (everything else still works) and if it had had USB, I might still use it to this day. There isn't a single device on the market today that gets the same mileage from standard AA batteries (because of its monochrome LDC display), the same portability, the instantaneous boot, the same comfortable keyboard. Nothing.

As for PCs, my carbon footprint is a very hefty size:

1992: 386 laptop with a whopping 20 Mb disk
1994: 486-DX266 PC
1997: Pentium I 120Mhz laptop
1999: Pentium II PC
2000: second-hand IBM Thinkpad
2003: IMac 17"
2006: Macbook
2008: My Linux PC for daily use.

Everything else, except for the Macbook, I have either sold, scrapped, given away or painted yellow and used as a stage prop. No machine has managed to keep up with the state of the art in software land, or with Steve Jobs' master plan. How many of today's websites will run on Internet Explorer 3? Who would want to use a 256-colour 640x480 monitor? The first portable music players sported a laughable 32 Mb of built-in memory. Your batteries would outlive your playlist many times over. I never owned one of them, though.

There are however two ancient digital workhorses that have stood me in good stead for over two decades. I have never bothered to replace them. I don't need to, because they do everything I want them to. More importantly, I don't have to replace them, because of incompatible firmware upgrades, new connector jacks, file formats or standard wars.