Out With The Old

I feel kind of wasteful.

Yesterday I got a great deal on a used PC. It is a year old Dell Dimensions 1100 with a 2.77 GHZ chip, 512 memory, a legit copy of Windows XP Business, and a legit copy of Office 2003 business. I paid $75 for it. It is a great PC at a great price.

The reason I feel wasteful is a basically threw out two old functioning PCs that were badly outdated. I bought both back in 1998 when I opened my office. I paid probably $3,500 for the pair. Over the years I updated the memory, operating system and replaced hard drives. I even fixed the cooling fans on both PC.

But finally the old girls just couldn’t keep up. One just ran a web cam and the other was backup storage.

So today I stripped out the hard drives and memory and tossed both boxes in the dumpster.

I remember when PCs were so expensive. I bought my first in 1992 for $2,000. It was a 386 with a 80 MB hard drive and 4 megs of ram. I still have the chip around here somewhere. I took it home and learned how to use it. It had a 1400 cardinal modem that I used to go onto bulletin boards.

I later got Compuserve.

Then I got a used 486 from my SIL for $500. What a deal and what a good PC. I eventually gave that PC to my BIL. He met his current wife on that PC.

I have had a dozen or more PCs since, but I still feel wasteful when I don’t run a PC until it dies.

Oh well.

This $75 PC could have run NASA or NORAD back in 1992.

We are living in good times.