Wednesday, October 29th, 2014

	Minimal requirements
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was a kid, I just wanted a computer. I didn't have any idea
what could it be good for, I just wanted to have one. My parents
bought for me a cheap second-hand Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone and
as I was most of the time just playing games and learning BASIC, 
this computer made me happy for years.

Then I "upgraded" to an old 286, which was in fact four years older
than my ZX clone, had monochrome display only and produced one hell
of a noise when running. Just as with the first one, I didn't have
any minimal requirements for this computer. Everybody had a PC, so
I wanted one too. With only handful of games willing to run on 
machine this old and just Turbo Pascal being able to use Hercules 
Graphics Card, another upgrade was eminent in less than one year.

But ever since when buying a computer, I had a set of criteria. Now
it's year 2014 and from certain point of view my requirements are 
even not as high as they were ten or fifteen years ago. I don't
play any recent games, I don't use computer to play 1080p video, 
so this is, what I really expect from my desktop:

-	to support native resolution of my LCD (which is 1920x1200)
-	to have an ethernet port (because network is the computer)
-	to run unix-like operating system (I can't live without sh)
-	to have either USB or FireWire port (because that's what my
	digital camera has)
    
All of these things can be achieved with any computer made in the
current millennium and even with older machines, providing they
have PCI bus. Anything more is a nice bonus, but for me certainly
not a must. What about you?