I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.

I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them, along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven’t been manufactered or supported for over a decade. I’m a packrat for old computer junk, though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old “beige” computer parts in the last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind of thing.

Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store, I didn’t think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I’m feeling kind of vintage these days.

The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.

The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than the bag had originally held.

You know you’re getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.