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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (30662)	8/6/1998 12:02:00 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Tip, That point will be reached the day after my puts expire. <G> MB

To: yard_man who wrote (30662)	8/11/1998 6:34:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 132070

Hi Tippet, I am late responding to your post, been on vacation, and going back again later this week so not only am I new and clueless, but late, and about to be hopeless. I think your question is a good one, that is, whether there will continue be a market for PCs in the future. I think so. I don't know the breakdown between PCs in the home and in the workplace, nor do I know where they are deployed, so you would need to get that information from someone/somewhere else. But with respect to MB's statement that industry will be too busy combating the Y2K bug to upgrade their PCs for a while, in my opinion the best solution to the Y2K problem is to buy new PCs and transfer your data from the old computers to new PCs. Isn't the Y2K problem more a problem with old mainframes and embedded chips? My brother-in-law is a Cobol programmer, and I don't think he has touched a PC in his life. I think a lot of people got tired of replacing their computer every year or so, every time Intel came out with a new chip, and just got to feeling burned. I bought my first computer in 1990, a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive and 8MB ram, it still runs Windows 3.11 fine, and I gave it to my husband for Dos games but it was too slow, so the youngest uses it for school papers. I also bought a 286 laptop with a 20 MB hard drive that year, it runs WP5.0 fine and the youngest uses it for his creative writing. I have two 486s, I use them at the office, and the PII is the game machine and Internet machine. As I posted yesterday to Bipin Prasad, as computers are getting cheaper and easier to use, more people that I come in contact with on a daily basis are buying them and using them. More people are going online. Computers are becoming a commodity, like calculators* and telephones. Mary Worth got a computer, for god's sake. One school in Fairfax County, Virginia, is proving sixth graders with laptops. (Mantua, they got a settlement for underground pollution and had to do something with the money, and this seemed perfectly sensible to them.) Ask yourself, do your neighbors all have computers? Are they all online? Does everyone in your family have a computer? If not, do they want one? Does your public library provide computer access to the internet? If so, do people line up to use it? When a new store opens up in your neighborhood, does it have computers for inventory? If the answer is no, I suggest to you that it is just a matter of time. This is one of the most profound changes in the development of human culture, and it isn't going to stop anytime soon. Maybe it is hard to make a profit selling a commodity, so that may be your real question. Who can sell the cheap stuff and still profit? See you, CobaltBlue *PS I am showing my age, but I remember the first hand-held calculators, they came out in 1972 and cost about $125, what would that be in 1998 dollars? I bought one, I was in college and am terrible at math. Now similar calculators are just cheap toys, I think you can get one for a dollar or so. We probably have half a dozen or more around the house.