This weekend an era came to an end, at least in my house. The last PC, dedicated to run a Microsoft OS got dismantled and put to rest for good.

The year was 1982 or 1983, when I brought my first computer home, a Triumph-Adler Intel 8085A based Alphatronic with two disk-drives and 48KB RAM. The Alphatronic was not CP/M compatible but used the MOS operating system instead and came with BASIC, Fortran and Pascal compilers. Just like the original IBM PC, I replaced it with about 2 years later, the computer was rented from a local computer store. Still in high-school, I was contracted to write a laboratory billing system for a clinical laboratory and could not afford to buy the machines. It must have been 1984 or 1985 when I finally had the money to buy my first computer, a PC-Clone from Zenith Data Systems, with no harddrive but a 8MHz fast NEC V20 processor. Ever since that time, I had at least one PC in my home that was dedicated to run a Microsoft operating system. There was the 80386 based Gateway PC, several more beige boxes followed, and the last one of its kind was a small tower style PC with an ATX motherboard and a 2GHz Pentium-4 processor, with most components purchased from the local PC-Club store, which also closed its doors just a few months back. Since 2002 I have gradually replaced PCs with Macs and at home the computer landscape now only features Mac minis, Macbooks, and an Apple TV.
The occasional need to run a Windows application can easily be satisfied by quickly warming-up a VM in VM-Ware Fusion, which I have conveniently stored on an external harddrive, and can therefore be used on any Mac.

A sad farewell? Not really!