Re: Old Computers

[Michael Bowen <fizzbowen@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 08:38 2001/07/24, Michael Edmiston wrote:
> A confession and an interesting story...
>
> When we "demoted" a bunch of 486 computers, we couldn't bear to throw them
> out, so we kept about 30 of them.  A year later we hadn't touched them, but
> we demoted 25 or so Pentium-75's.  We threw out the 486 and kept the P-75's.
> A year later we demoted 25 or 30 Pentium-133's.  We threw the P-75's out of
> storage and stored the P-133's.  This happened again.  Today we have P-233's
> in storage and are beginning to demote P-333's.  We will probably clean out
> the storage room of P-233's and put the old P-333's there.  We haven't
> learned our lesson yet.

Somewhere in your community are bright high school and college students who
are too poor to buy a computer, even an old one. Elsewhere in your
community are retired engineers looking for volunteer opportunities.
Recruit the engineers to come to your campus, find them a workbench and 10
or 20 square meters of floor space in the back of a lab room, and give the
retirees your demoted computers to test and (if they're really old)
refurbish. Then give the working computers away to poor but promising
students. Your financial aid office can verify economic need if the demand
exceeds the supply. It's a nice community outreach gesture, and we've been
doing it successfully for two years now at our community college. When
demand exceeded supply (which it did in our program after one semester), we
solicited and received additional equipment donations (tax-deductible, of
course) from local companies.

By the way, my main computer at home is a P-233. It works great and will
last me at least another couple of years, but I wish I lived a little
closer to your college so I could get myself an upgrade. :-)

--MB