This is a short history of the computers I worked with, and how I named them. It is mostly to myself, so I don’t tag it.
The old days: PCs
The first PC we had was a 33 MHz (Turbo Boost!) 486 Intel with a 15" Monitor – an awesome machine at the time with Windows 3.1 on it. It even had a CD drive! I mostly used Paintbrush and played games like Commander Keen, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Sam & Max, and Secret Agent. I even programmed with QBasic under DOS. This is where I learned to program.
AMD and Vaio
The I got my own PC: a 266 MHz AMD K III, with 64MB RAM if I remember correctly. It had Windows 95 I suppose. Having become an AMD fan, my next one was a 500 MHz Athlon, maybe with 256 MB. It’s HD was still in use later, in Hikari.
Then I bought an Athlon 2200+ machine with 512 MB which I gave to my aunt (for free) later. It was called Seras.
My first notebook was a very nice Sony Vaio which I called Chihiro. You can see I was an Anime fan already. It had a 2 GHz Pentium 4. I used it throughout my first 4 semesters and took it everywhere. But I grew out of it, the CD drive broke, and I was happy to give it to somebody else (for free, again). After reinstalling I called it Motoko and gave it away.
Around 2006: Switch to Macs
Of course, I already had a replacement: my first MacBook, 1,83 GHz Core Duo, 1GB RAM (the default configuration was only 512 KB!) – Henrietta. The hard drive died :( but they managed to restore my data and I revived her as Rico. What a machine! My first software project for Transformal wouldn’t have been possible without her. MacBooks rock for software – and I even played Diablo II with it. She’s still with me, but I figured I need more speed, more space, and a real 64 bit CPU.
So I bought a second MacBook, about the best one you can get, 2,4 GHz model with 4GB RAM, and called her Triella. She is currently my working machine, and I’m typing this article with her. Her Windows XP alter ego is called Igor. I really loved my Triella!
In addition, I bought Simon’s old 24" Mac since he bough a new one, and I called it Batou (since he insisted that I give it a male name!) He also gave me his Airport Extreme, which I called OC Pupsen (German for “farting”), and it is serving my WLAN networt called Muffincore.
iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pros
And I bought one of the first iPhones, a week after it came out in Germany – the cheaper 8GB model, of course. It’s called Isako. 2G, no GPS, but still – it was my iPod, my cell phone, my toy, my city and world map, my calendar, my time table, my portable drive (with viewer), my fancy equipment, world clock, my stop watch, my calculator, my flashlight, my camery, my newspaper, my contacts, my mirror, even my spirit level. My little computer. Isako lived in my back pocket. Since I used her as my alarm clock, she was the first and last thing I’m using on a typical day.
After being super happy with my second MacBook, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro 13" after the Sandy Bridge update, i7 for fastest Ruby programming performance, even paid for the SSD upgrade (which was super expensive at the time – 600€ for 256GB!). I named her Fio. My new 27" iMac is Alpha. My 2GB Time Capsule is called Fenton; I relaced it with a newer version later, and named it Dreidel.
My iPhone 4 later was just called Isako 4. My mum used Isako until upgrading to a 4S much later; it still worked in 2014. The other iPhone 4 I bought in New Zealand (couldn’t get around the stupid SIM lock on Isako 4) was given to my friend Nico, and is still called Black Cat. My first generation iPad was called Moro; I sold it to my best friend Sonja later (she dubbed it “Kosmos”). I bought an iPad mini for me an Julia, which we called Toph, and later gave to my mum because we weren’t really using it.
After dropping my iPhone 4 into a toilet in Scotland (*snif*), I bought a new black iPhone 5 called Maytag. This was replaced by a “spacegray” 6s that I called Revy.
Julia’s first MacBook Air is called Ponyo. Still thinking about a name for my upcoming MacBook Pro Retina 13"…it should have something to do with Fio, so I called her Nahoko.