My computer is named after Charles Darwin, author of Origin of Species. I've always had a fascination with evolution, heredity, and genetics. However, the name seemed appropriate for my computer since, over the years, it has "evolved".

If you're uninterested in the boring details, stop reading now. :)

In 1995 I used money from the sale of a 4-wheeler and a gracious loan from my mother to buy a Cyrix 686. It ran at 120 Mhz, had a whopping 32M RAM, 2Gig hard drive, 8X CDROM, a 15" monitor, Microsoft Natural keyboard, and Labtec speakers with a subwoofer.

In 1998 I paid a large sum to add an additional 7G hard drive. At some point I decided I needed a 3D graphics card, and upgraded from the Matrox Millenium to an STB Velocity 128. At the end of my first year in college in 1999, after being thrifty all year, I splurged on an upgrade: a new motherboard, K6-III CPU at 400Mhz, and 128M RAM, which all required a new case and power supply.

Mom got the old case/processor/motherboard/video card. But, Darwin's old floppy drive was not standard, so it had to remain with its old case. A 720K floppy was salvaged for Darwin but, really, who uses a 720k floppy drive anymore?

Darwin's Operating System has also evolved over time. Darwin arrived with Windows 95, a definite improvement over Widnows 3.1. Soon after Windows 98 was released, Darwin was upgraded. Then came Slackware. My high school used Linux for several (most) of its servers. I became interested, and decided to install Linux at home. Slackware seemed to have the most installation documentation, and made the cut. After a lengthly (24hr) modem download, repartitioning, and installation, Darwin was reborn.

Darwin has since run Windows NT-WS 4.0, and Windows 2000... but neither provided the stability and customization of Linux, so they lived short lives.

Update: July 7, 2001

At some point during the Fall 2000 semester, I upgraded to a nice new 30-Gig hard drive. La familia, of course, got the old 2-Gigger.

Then, less than a month ago, I was introduced to the fun that is the LAN party. This only went to show how aged my computer was becoming. A proper computer science major can't have that, now, can he? NO!

Enter a new graphics card (NVidia GeForce2 GTS), CPU (Athlon 1.2Ghz), which required a new motherboard, which required a new power supply and new cheap RAM (256M).

I'd never gamed on my machine before. It had never quite had the *umf* needed to push through the graphics applications du jour. But, now it's screamin'. Yeay!

Also, I've been running Debian for a couple weeks now. I'd tried it a while back, and had troubles upgrading to the "unstable" branch of packages. I tried a few more times, and finally, it worked. Now I'm loving the simplicity of apt-get, and am wondering how I survived before I had it.

Update: March 24, 2002

A month or two ago I splurged on enough computer parts to assemble a new computer. I had gone with a coworker to a computer store to help her buy a new computer and been overcome by the need for new hardware.

Things ended up being a bit more expensive than I had thought, because the motherboard that had been removed from "Darwin" had apparently gone bad while sitting in its protective plastic covering. New motherboard, new power supply. New case. Fast Ethernet switch with 2 network cards. Whopping 100G drive. So, now I've got a home network.

Darwin is now a completely new machine. Its only piece that has been in the computer originally named "Darwin" is a video card. However, since the new Darwin was to be the firewall and web server, visible to the outside world, it made the most sense to give it the same name as my web server.

The old computer has been dubbed "Cracker" as in honkey-gringo, not saltine or hacker.