I have to admit to a little twinge the other day when I shut down and closed up the old laptop for the last time.

It's been a fixture on the desk for so long, pleasantly waiting to be used, never complaining when it was ignored or forced to spend hours in menial tasks no doubt far below its CPU's abilities.

For an iBook, it had a long, if not very rewarding life. Several of its more innovative features didn't get used much - mostly because of a bad decision over a printer, and pressures of the job I had then.

As early as 2005, it was already showing the first nagging signs of the obsolescence that would end its working life, but it staggered on until early this month, balking at an increasing array of websites and causing more and more anxiety for its human operator: Would it start up this time? Would the extensions load properly? Would this graphic and Flash-laden website finally send it into computer senility? Would this crash on the homepage of the Globe and Mail be the final one it would recover from?

Now, it's been relegated to the corner of the keyboard shelf, below the Deep Thought-ian monolith that stretches across the desk.

I think I'm going to miss the little iBook's odd personality, those little quirks it developed over the years - like the grumpy electronic groan it made when woken up after sleeping on the desk.

Or its inability to do anything new without protesting - a trait it had from its earliest years. Install a new program or even run one that hadn't been used in a while, and it got cranky on the next startup.

And, as with many things well past their prime, in the past few months I've been wondering if it wasn't about to crash for good whenever it locked up on a website or became overburdened with email attachments.

Now, it's closed up, shut down, turned off. Does it dream? Probably not.

It's hardly an AI. But then I don't think I'd be comfortable having that much power over even an artificial intelligence - shutting the iBook down after moving all the stuff I wanted to keep to the new computer reminded me a lot of Bowman pulling HAL's memory blocks in 2001.

My first computer, an old PC that was, in the words of the guy I bought it from, "infinitely expandable", ended up in a truck being recycled a couple of months ago. (Infinitely expandable, that is, until someone thought up a Pentium processor - yes, it was a long time ago.) Full color monitors and the advent of the internet put it on the way to the junk pile 15 years ago, and it spent years in a box in storage because I didn't know what to do with a dead computer.

I wonder how long it's going to be before this new one - the one I'm using right now - is going to seem as frustratingly archaic as that first 386-PC, or as obsolete as the little iBook that finally lost the ability to connect to CTV.com a few months ago.

I joked with the guy I bought it from that the next one ("I speak now of the computer that is to come…": Deep Thought, again) will just be a hyper-sophisticated data link that we'll plug into the back of our brains and think our way onto the internet.

It's either that, or the Mayans were right after all, and we won't have to worry much about it.

I have to admit to a little twinge the other day when I shut down and closed up the old laptop for the last time.

It's been a fixture on the desk for so long, pleasantly waiting to be used, never complaining when it was ignored or forced to spend hours in menial tasks no doubt far below its CPU's abilities.

For an iBook, it had a long, if not very rewarding life. Several of its more innovative features didn't get used much - mostly because of a bad decision over a printer, and pressures of the job I had then.

As early as 2005, it was already showing the first nagging signs of the obsolescence that would end its working life, but it staggered on until early this month, balking at an increasing array of websites and causing more and more anxiety for its human operator: Would it start up this time? Would the extensions load properly? Would this graphic and Flash-laden website finally send it into computer senility? Would this crash on the homepage of the Globe and Mail be the final one it would recover from?

Now, it's been relegated to the corner of the keyboard shelf, below the Deep Thought-ian monolith that stretches across the desk.

I think I'm going to miss the little iBook's odd personality, those little quirks it developed over the years - like the grumpy electronic groan it made when woken up after sleeping on the desk.

Or its inability to do anything new without protesting - a trait it had from its earliest years. Install a new program or even run one that hadn't been used in a while, and it got cranky on the next startup.

And, as with many things well past their prime, in the past few months I've been wondering if it wasn't about to crash for good whenever it locked up on a website or became overburdened with email attachments.

Now, it's closed up, shut down, turned off. Does it dream? Probably not.

It's hardly an AI. But then I don't think I'd be comfortable having that much power over even an artificial intelligence - shutting the iBook down after moving all the stuff I wanted to keep to the new computer reminded me a lot of Bowman pulling HAL's memory blocks in 2001.

My first computer, an old PC that was, in the words of the guy I bought it from, "infinitely expandable", ended up in a truck being recycled a couple of months ago. (Infinitely expandable, that is, until someone thought up a Pentium processor - yes, it was a long time ago.) Full color monitors and the advent of the internet put it on the way to the junk pile 15 years ago, and it spent years in a box in storage because I didn't know what to do with a dead computer.

I wonder how long it's going to be before this new one - the one I'm using right now - is going to seem as frustratingly archaic as that first 386-PC, or as obsolete as the little iBook that finally lost the ability to connect to CTV.com a few months ago.

I joked with the guy I bought it from that the next one ("I speak now of the computer that is to come…": Deep Thought, again) will just be a hyper-sophisticated data link that we'll plug into the back of our brains and think our way onto the internet.

It's either that, or the Mayans were right after all, and we won't have to worry much about it.