Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?
Alicia Carla Longstreet (carla@ici.net) wrote: : 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. : : 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 Buy old 'outdated' PC's give them new life with a new : BIOS then sell them to institutions, companies, or homes who can't : afford new equipment.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. 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, even in corporate shops that are still running WordPerfect 5.1 on Novell 3.x. Most companies just don't keep very many PCs for that long any more. They've already learned that PCs are consumables that are used up in 3 to 5 years. This is, in my opinion, a very, _very_ small part of the year 2000 problem. David W. Fenton | New York University | The way of stylistic tolerance dfenton@bway.net | dwf4930@is2.nyu.edu | may lead to the final horror of http://www.bway.net/~dfenton | John Tesh. --Alex Ross, NYTimes