So, my 20" computer monitor just died. I never thought that I'd actually have an emotional attachment to a monitor, but recently, I was reminded a bunch of things that this monitor went through.
I bought it toward the beginning of 1996, for a sum that would seem outrageous for a monitor today. 17" monitors were just becoming the norm, and this 20" (which is probably smaller than the average monitor today) looked like a behemoth. But I was in college at the time, and wanted a monitor that could double as a TV (because we didn't have room for both). And I bought it to go with my brand-spanking-new 120mhz Pentium.
One of my friends reminded me that the first really hilarious thing that happened was that when it arrived at my dorm, I discovered that I couldn't even get the box into my dorm room, because it was wider than the door. Braveheart [imdb.com] had just come out in the rental stores, and we crammed about 20 people into our dorm room to watch it on my new "TV".
I had my sound card hooked into my stereo so that the sound would be great (and be loud as hell). And I used to have a shotgun blast set as my new mail sound (remember Eudora anyone?). Normally, I would shut down my offline mail reader when we would watch TV or movies, but occasionally, I would forget and that sound would go off right at the most dramatic scene of a movie (usually when one of the main characters had a gun in their hand).
Later that same year, one of my friends went out to buy an actual TV for his dorm room, and was going to buy a 19" one, until he realized that it was going to be smaller than my monitor... at which point, he took it back and bought a bigger one.
But I got over 10 years of use out of it, which is far beyond what I could have expected. The monitor outlasted 4 different desktop computers (a 120mhz Pentium, a 300mhz Pentium-II, a 600mhz Athlon, and a 1.2Ghz Athlon). The year after I bought the monitor was the last year that the Cleveland Indians seriously had a shot at winning the World Series. And at the time, we were playing Descent [wikipedia.org], Mechwarrior II [wikipedia.org], and Command and Conquer [wikipedia.org]. In 1996, the first version of Microsoft Visual Studio [wikipedia.org] hadn't come out yet, and we all were still running Windows 95 (but beta-testing NT4). I guess you're a computer geek when this is how you measure time...
But I'm really going to miss that monitor. All 70 lbs of it.
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