Remember back in the day, when you had to spend $3000 to get a mediocre computer that could just barely do what you wanted it to and was overtaxed after a year?  I certainly do.  When my family got a brand-new Gateway 2000 in 1995, it came with a huge 17” monitor and an even larger case.  We opted for the 124-key AnyKey keyboard, and bought an HP LaserJet 5P.  The total price, including the $800 printer, was just about $3000. 

The computer had a Pentium-75 (we decided we didn’t need the then-state-of-the-art 100 MHz chip) and 16 MB of RAM.  We also spent a bit extra for an upgraded, 2 MB PCI video card.  We thought it would be plenty for our needs.  Boy, were we wrong.  The first problem came when we decided to get a 1 GB hard drive.  Our previous computer had a 20 MB one, so we thought we were living large getting a full 1 GB.  Imagine our surprise when we turned on the computer for the first time and the hard drive was already half-full with the preinstalled software.  We kept that computer as our primary one until 1999, and by the end of its life we were spending more time clearing stuff off the hard drive to make way for the pagefile than we actually did using the computer.

Let’s fast-forward to today.  About a month ago, my grandmother called me, frantic.  Her computer wouldn’t get past the Roxio GoBack screen that normally appeared before Windows started.  I’m across the country in Utah, and she’s in Maryland, so my younger brother who’s still at home went over to her house and diagnosed that the hard drive had suffered a head crash.  Her computer is six years old, and it was working just fine for her up to that time (I’ve upgraded it a bit over the years), but we decided that it might make sense for her to get a new one.

One of the goals was data integrity – she had been backing up to Zip disks and so hadn’t been able to save all of her data.  I recommended that she get a computer with a DVD burner so she could use that for backup.  So with that in mind, I started doing research.  I went to Dell’s site, but the lowest price at which I could configure a new computer with a floppy disk (she likes her floppies), 512 MB of RAM, and a DVD burner was $519.  By the standards of ten years ago, that price would have been amazingly low, but now I’m jaded and the price did not look good to me.  So I looked on Dell Outlet, which sells preconfigured computers that have been returned and reconditioned, and found a similar computer for $356.  Unfortunately, it didn’t come with a floppy drive, and it only had a 90-day warranty, which I couldn’t upgrade.

So I looked at building her a computer.  I found an Antec case with a 350-watt power supply; a Celeron D 330 (2.66 GHz); an Intel 845-baseed motherboard with integrated graphics, sound, and network; 512 MB of DDR; an 80 GB Seagate hard drive with a five-year warranty; and an NEC DVD burner.  I would use a modem and floppy that I had laying around.  The total cost came out to a staggeringly low $340.  That’s not the lowest you can possibly get a computer for, but it’s a good deal for one with a DVD burner and 512 MB of RAM.

The best thing was not the low price (a bit more than a tenth of what we paid for a mediocre computer back in 1995), but the fact that this computer will probably do all she needs it to do far into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.  And she is about as demanding as the average computer user; she browses the internet, checks her email, uses Word and Excel, and keeps track of finances using Quicken and TaxCut.  And she plays Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Sure, the gamers and video editors of the world need a faster computer than that.  But most people don’t use particularly demanding programs.  Obsolescence is, ironically, pretty much obsolete: computers have reached the point where the absolute lowest end of what’s available today will be sufficient for probably 75% of all computer users.  Furthermore, computers have gone the route of CD players and TVs – they’re a commodity that will only get less expensive as time goes on.  People might buy fancy computers with huge LCDs and awesome video cards, just as some buy big-screen TVs and expensive CD jukeboxes.  But now, amazingly, they don’t need to.  Oh, how things change…