16 Jun
2000
16 Jun
'00
5:14 p.m.
On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:
On June 16, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
I'm sure that if you did a web search, you'd find thousands of essays
deploring our "consumerist, throw-away society". I won't write one here.
Not to mention, only so many people who would
know what to *do* with
an old Commodore, VAX, TI 99, etc. As far as the rest of the world is
concerned, it's "trash"....
Only our broken, brain-damaged society can take a thing that does
it's job just as well as when it was new, and call it "trash" simply
because something newer (not necessarily "better") has been
announced by the vendors. Fascinating...and disturbing.
My primary car is a '95. It continued to run
just fine when the '96
came out. There's a clue in there somewhere.
Big difference, though. A car is a car is a car. As long as it keeps
running well and doesn't cost too much to fix, keep it. I never understood
the mentality saying you gotta have a new car every year, or whatever.
I *do* know there is a big difference between my Apple II (which still
does yeoman service running my Syntauri synthesizer) and the
PowerComputing PowerCenter 240 that I do most of my "real work" on. And,
no, I'm not going back to the Apple II and a dot-matrix printer to do my
newsletters on, or surf the Net.
So as far as the non-computer-collecting community is concerned (how's
that for alliteration, huh?), things have improved exponentially since the
early days of the Imsai, the Apple or even the original IBM-PC. There's no
real reason for them to store, let alone maintain the older
equipment....and, unless one of us geeks hears about it, and is in a
position to "rescue" said equipment...off to the landfill/scrapper/China
it goes...