Snapshot

I have a nine- or ten-year-old iBook, which is still used (occasionally) by my five year old son. It's shows wear in it's bright orange casing, and it's just about worthless in comparison to the computers I use today, but it has this persistent sentimental value to me. It was my first portable computer, and I ordered it hours after it was introduced (though I had to wait for a frustrating two or three months for it to arrive). I adored it, and I've been using a laptop ever since.

I eventually bought another iBook to replace it — essentially the same design, but in a vibrant, radioactive green! — and when that model was damaged and needed repair, I had the hard drive replaced with something larger. The green iBook was eventually sold, and the original drive was returned to me, all but forgotten.

I came across it not too long ago when I was tidying up in my office, and I thought it might be fun — and relatively easy, if I followed the directions carefully — to replace the smaller drive in my old orange iBook. If nothing else, I thought, it might make the iBook slightly more useful. (The larger drive is still only 10 GB. Doesn't most of the iPod range has more storage than that these days?)

When I started up the iBook from that old drive, I saw a snapshot of my life as it was three years ago. Email that had just been sent and recieved, projects in progress, receipts from a business trip. My desktop picture, a false-color image of Saturn's moon Titan. (I still have that picture, on my iPhone.)