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

In article <327422F9.3539@ici.net> Alicia Carla Longstreet <carla@ici.net> writes: >A BIOS chip upgrade on any computer costs anywhere from $35.00 to $80.00 >depending on the company. Obviously any PC that relly needs replacing >will be, but a lot of PC's just used for word processing or simple data >entry (both tasks that don't take a really highpowered machine) might >not be, a simple BIOS upgrade will solve the problem on any of these >PC's. >I have dealt with at least three companies that produce custom BIOS >chips for any PC ever made. I suspect that these companies might be >good prospects for a Stock Market buy. In all seriousness, Alicia, I think you're right and I'd like to know the names of some of those companies. :-) >Of course with a $1,000.00 investment in an EPROM writer and a few >thousand EPROM's plus a good BIOS source code, we could go into business >for ourselves. Buy old 'outdated' PC's give them new life with a new >BIOS then sell them to institutions, companies, or homes who can't >afford new equipment. Some of the bigger companies might let you have >old PC's just for the expense of removing them. I think that there could be quite a business in almost any enterprise that enables a company to breathe life into older PCs without having to replace them entirely. New BIOS chips could become a hot property. Motherboard replacements could be a smaller but present business. If you think about it, we "technologists" quickly buried last-year's computers in our own minds... but the companies who bought them didn't, and miracle of miracles, those "obsolete" computers are churning out the results just as dependably and just as quickly as they always did. All sorts of variations on the theme of "breathing new life into 'obsolete' equipment" could be a growing market for products and services. /mr/