Monday, January 5, 1998
Christmas, Computers
and Cars
by D.A. Ridgely
([email protected])
Now that Christmas has passed, we will soon be buying our big Christmas present for the year -- a new computer. It will be our fifth computer since the early 80s, when I brought home an Apple II+ paid for by profits on some Apple stock I bought a year and a day earlier. The entire system (including an RBG monitor, daisywheel printer, external floppy disk drive and 300 baud modem) cost well over $3,000. Big money, then and now. My wife's reaction was "You spent how much for what?!"
Several years later the Apple crashed and my wife panicked. She was now "unable" to write without a word processor. Soon we were the proud owners of an IBM 286 clone and the repaired Apple computer. Both now sit in our attic waiting for an invitation from the Smithsonian.
Our next, a 386, is my wife's office computer now, still used almost exclusively for word processing (and solitaire). Our three-year-old 486 sits at home and runs just fine, but our children's software demands much more speed and memory. We are, in effect, going to buy a $3,000 toy, however we may rationalize its educational value. In three or four years it, too, will be "obsolete." Count on it.
We buy computers these days like our parents bought automobiles, trading in every several years for the latest, biggest, fastest, most powerful model. Except, alas, there is virtually no trade-in value or used computer market. It's as though not only the cars but the roads also change, soon to be incompatible with the older, still good, machines.
Life is change, and we can (thankfully) afford our new toys. It's a shame, though, that there is no viable second-hand market for those who can't. The big difference between the haves and the have-nots is not between the 486 and the Pentium II owners, but between those who have computers of any sort and those who don't.
Soon the 486 will be in my office, running my old, perfectly good software, connected at a (slow?) 28.8k baud to the internet, doing everything I want it to do for at least a few more years. Foolishly, I only wish I had also bought, say, a few shares of Intel stock back when I got the 286 or the 386 or the 486.
Say… that gives me an idea!
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