Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

David W. Fenton wrote: > > Alicia Carla Longstreet (carla@ici.net) wrote: >(SNIP) Buy old 'outdated' PC's give them new life with a new BIOS > (SNIP) > This is ridiculous. > > What will you _run_ on these PCs? > > Wordstar 3.0? > > The vast majority of these computers will have been retired by the year > 2000 simply because they won't be able to run up-to-date software (486 > computers don't usually do terribly well with Win95, and not well at all > with NT). By 2000, 486's will be at least four to five years old, and five > years is the point at which a business PC has been fully depreciated and > can be retired. > > You hardly see any 386's out there any more, (SNIP) > > David W. Fenton | > New York University Ah Mr Fenton, someone who works in and deals only with big(ish) companies eh? I can assure you that there are a lot of people out there in the world of small business that are happily using Wordperfect and much older software (WordStar for example) for word processing duties on DOS, let alone Win 311. WP and small Database/Spreadsheet stuff really isn't that difficult and they really don't care about the computer as long as it does what they ask of it. I have run into plenty of XT's and AT's happily churning away and 386's might not be seen in big business or academia by by God they are out there in droves believe me! Why do most people need all the functionality of Word 7 and Win95? Answer is they don't and 90% of users only regularily use a small subset of the functionality available. Just as a final exapmple, I was called in to solve a problem in stock control and ordering system in a fairly large Hardware wholesaler business up country. The problem was the business was being sold by the retiring Boss and they were trying to run a report that they had never run before which wasn't working. When I got there I found an ancient PC of indeterminate age, probably a Commadore (The sticker had gone) running a CPM operating system with a custom shell written to run the stock system. When I asked why it hadn't been replaced the reply was 'Why? It does the job real fine!' Richard