Keeping your machine up to date

Press, 14 October 1986, Page 24

Keeping your machine up to date

By

NEILL BIRSS

Computers make the planned obsolescence of the car industry as sedate as the ageing of a turtle. In microcomputers the push is to sell AT models to the millions of users of IMB PC and compatible machines.

The AT range is the bigger brother of the PC family, with a faster microprocessor, and much more scope for expansion. It will run much of the software that drives the PC range. The copying of the IBM PC first by American makers and then by the Asians, has brought the machine family and its rich library of software within the reach of millions of people. But the machine is now too slow for many new applications

such as desktop publishing.

But even for the buyer of a clone in such a purchasing group as university staff, who often pay much less than of the public, the cost can be heavy. Depreciation seldom comes as a surprise to an accountant. But when a small business person buys say, an IBM PC with a hard disk drive for $13,000 in May, 1985, and decides to sell it in October, 1986, and finds it is worth only about $4500, the reaction is dismay.

This must be one of the reasons why some of the steam has gone out of the computer revolution, at least on its lower consumer levels. Who an afford depreciation of almost 50 per cent a year?

The car industry went through this years ago. It is documented in what I think it is the best of all business books, “My Years With General Motors,” by Sloan.

The car makers in America in the 1920 s and 1930 s established the annual model change to keep sales moving. But they quickly realised that the sales of new cars depended on a good re-sale value for secondhand cars. Ford and General Motors entered the second-hand car market, keeping the prices up so that used models would have sufficient trade-in values to allow sellers to buy new cars. Computers are in a free market. Second-hand values are poor arid plunging by the week. Take what you can get

today, or accept considerably less next month. The makers do not care.

In big machines it is even worse; some old (seven or eight years) mainframes have been given to schools to pull apart.

One answer is that you do not need to change your machine at all if it does what you want. There will always be more attractive software that you cannot run on your Model T. But remember that next year there will be a new model and the longer you wait the more up to date you will be when you buy. .

There are other means of help if your present machine does not measure up. For the IBM PC range, for example, there are accelerator cards that will give you

the speed of an AT. One card will even give enhanced graphics and acceleration at the same time.

If you have a True Blue (genuine) IBM PC, you can quickly run out of chassis slots for the cards that make adapation and expansion possible.

But available in New Zealand (Asian clone versions) and from America by mail are expansion chassis that allow you to add a stack of new cards to keep the machine useful.

The thing to be careful of is that you do not spend more on hotting up your PC (or equivalent) than you would spend on taking the loss by quitting it and buying an AT or compatible. Other brands suffer from the update problem.

What do you do with your old System 80, or the Commodore 64, or Apple II?

Most computer users are not rich. Micromputers in New Zealand generally, power small businesses or are the hobby of individuals. It is not conspicuous consumption. Generally for a home user the expenditure will have to be justified to family and spouse. If the initial plunge is difficult to justify, the upgrade is many times harder.

That’s why an advertisement in the “Wall Street Journal” this month is welcome. It announced that Computer Land, the international chain, was introducing a “box” computer. It had keyboard chassis and monitor.

You buy it and when you want to upgrade, you just buy another board, and fit it in the chassis, and boot up. No worries about the PC being made obsolescent by the AT. No worry about the AT being made obsolescent by the next IBM family based on the 8086 microprocessor. Just buy a new board, and install it.

This option will not be cheap. But it should be cheaper. It still provides a living for the retailer: new boards and new software.

Drawbacks are possible. One wonders about new motherhoards. But the system may point the way.

We now wait for the new franchisee of Computer Land to bring in the box for public evaluation.