---- >Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass > > Coming Soon...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0 > See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details! > Hi,Sam: When I went after that article early yesterday morning I got in OK, but when I tried later was rejected...not being in the U.S. I was interested as a result of providing a little information on a Samsung S300 for one of the writers. As an aside, the computer video ran on local cable but I have not had much feedback. At present I am starting another one: "Seventy five years of home movies". Regards Charlie Fox -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/attachments/19980313/53d21fd6/12die.htm -------------- next part -------------- <NYT_HEADER version="1.0" type="main"> <NYT_BANNER version="1.0" type="main"> </NYT _BANNER> <NYT_TOOLBARMAP version="1.0" type="main"><map name="maintoolbar"> <area shape="rect" coords="0,0,75,16" href="/yr/mo/day/" onMouseOver="window.status='Click to go to the Home Page';return true"><area shape="rect" coords="76,0,154,16" href="/info/contents/sections.html" onMouseOver="window.status='Click to see a list of sections';return true"><area shape="rect" coords="155,0,233,16" href="/info/contents/contents.html" onMouseOver="window.status='Click for the full Table of Contents';return true"><area shape="rect" coords="234,0,312,16" href="/search/daily/" onMouseOver="window.status='Click to search the current site';return true"><area shape="rect" coords="313,0,391,16" href="/comment/" onMouseOver="window.status='Click for discussion in the Forums';return true"><area shape="rect" coords="392,0,468,16" href="/subscribe/help/" onMouseOver="window.status='Click to visit the Help Center';return true"></map></NYT_TOOLBARMAP><NYT_TOOLBAR version="1.0" type="main"> </NYT _TOOLBAR> <NYT_AD version="1.0" location="top" type="main"> </NYT _AD> </NYT_HEADER> <NYT_DATE version="1.0" type=" "> March 12, 1998 </NYT_DATE><NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" "> Where Do Computers Go When They Die? </NYT_HEADLINE><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" "> By CAREY GOLDBERG </NYT_BYLINE> f Americans treated dead people the way they treat dead computers, their basements and closets would be cluttered with family corpses. Under many a desk, there would be a cadaver crammed into the arch meant for knees. Whole warehouses and offices would function as ad hoc mausoleums. RELATED ARTICLES In the Beginning, There Was Kaypro (Requires Flash plug-in from Macromedia) If You Can Bring Yourself to Part With It <nobr>. . .</nobr> 10 Uses for a Dead Computer Fish tank. But it s a lot of work to make it waterproof. Litter box. If your kitty isn t too picky. Decoration. Chips and circuit boards can be made into earrings and clipboards. Gold mine. Many 60 s units used a fair amount of gold. Furniture. Use it as doorstop or high-tech hassock. Reincarnation. Use it to play old games or upgrade it to use as a backup device or personal Web server. Planet saver. Recycle it and feel noble. Source of cash. But not much. Sell it to a secondhand-computer shop. Gift. If it s still breathing, donate it to a good cause or give it to a friend or relative. Boat anchor. <div align=right> The New York Times</div> And only the diligent few, whether out of conscience or lack of space, would dispose of the departed properly. The rest, unable to let go or to find a proper resting place, would offer excuses like, "He cost me so much money in life. I can't accept that he's worthless now!" and, "She was a formative influence in my youth. How can I dump her?" Of course, it makes about as much sense to do nothing with antiquated computers as it did for the eccentric family in John Irving's "Hotel New Hampshire" to stuff their dead little dog and keep him around the house long after his barking and fetching days were past. Yet researchers believe that roughly 14 million to 20 million computers are retired each year in this country, and of those, a 1995 Tufts University thesis estimated, nearly 75 percent are simply stockpiled, taking their place on obscure shelves, under Ping-Pong tables, in unused offices, in hallways. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of them will be re-used or recycled, studies indicated, and 15 percent end up in landfills. True, those numbers are changing, say many involved in the burgeoning businesses of giving old computers new life. In the last few years, thousands of computer reselling and recycling outfits have cropped up around the country, a recent Rand Corp. report said. And the stream those resellers and recyclers depend on -- of functional but dull-edged castoffs -- has swollen as the typical active life span of a new computer in its original work setting has shrunk to as little as two or three years. The companies that funnel older computers to schools and to the technologically needy have been multiplying and are becoming an increasingly national phenomenon, spurred by new tax incentives and the sheer volume of discards. Whole directories on the Internet list groups that take old computers. One of the largest such funnelers, the Detwiler Foundation, based in San Diego, has already placed 37,000 computers in California schools and is branching out into at least nine other states. The federal government is running a program, Computers for Learning, to place hundreds of thousands of old government computers in schools. "When you're flushing a million computers out every year, they disappear like ink into blotting paper," said Clive Smith, chief executive officer of New Deal, a Cambridge, Mass., company specializing in software that lets older computers act like newer ones. "When you're flushing 10 million a year, the market mechanisms have to emerge to deal with it." And emerging they are. But the juiciest mystery inherent in "closetware," as some call the squirreled-away old computers, is why it has taken so long, and why, even now, so few older computers are promptly resold or donated. Credit: Keith Meyers / The New York Times Computers await meltdown. Certainly, those in the business say, owners' emotional attachment to old computers plays a role. At the East West Education Development Foundation, a Boston nonprofit company that refurbishes and supplies old computers to good causes, the president, Stephen Farrell, said that for donors who bring in their obsolete machines, "it's like bringing your dog to be euthanized -- it's really hard to part with." Brigitte Jordan, a corporate anthropologist and principal scientist at Xerox's research center in Palo Alto, Calif., speculated that owners' attachments to their computers went beyond even the powerful attachments they can form to their cars, in part because computers are so much more interactive and in part because the machines can become repositories of parts of their owners' lives. Of her own first computer, Ms. Jordan said: "It had not only my work on it but my poems and stories on it. It had on it a sort of snapshot of my life at that time, and when I got a new machine, not all of that got transferred. Somehow, in the transition from one machine to another, some piece of my life got lost. It's like losing a photo album." Personal attachments to personal computers are one thing; professional ones are another. Love of machine can be so great that operators of early computers, like the room-size Univac, have been known to take them home when they were decommissioned, said Oliver Strimpel, director of the Computer Museum in Boston. At the museum's Silicon Valley historical collection in Mountain View, Calif., he said, "I've seen people hugging disk drives and computers like long-lost friends they've spent big parts of their lives with." Also seemingly at work in owners' clinging to their computers is a certain inability to accept the harsh economic reality of computer depreciation -- the fact that a machine that cost $3,000 just four years ago is now worth less than $100. In 1991, H. Scott Matthews, then an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, helped produce a study that predicted that by 2005, 150 million computers would be cluttering the country's landfills. Last year, Matthews returned to the much-quoted study, re-evaluated its predictions based on updated figures and lowered that projection, to 55 million. He and his co-authors cited the "second life" given computers by newly established markets for recycled electronic goods as a central reason for the revised estimate. But the biggest reason for the change, he said, was something else: "I think the fundamental behavioral issue we did not consider in the first paper, that we do now, is that people don't want to throw away anything that they think has value. If you have something you paid a couple of thousand of dollars for, you're going to have a hard time throwing it away, even if you don't use it anymore." Especially if it still works fine. But aren't Americans supposed to be experts at throwing things away? Credit: Ed Quinn for The New York Times Scott Cole of Boston with old mice. "This is the opposite of the disposable society," said Matthews, now a doctoral candidate in economics at Carnegie Mellon's Green Design Initiative. "This is the attic society." Robert Dangelmeyer, a service manager for the Digital Equipment Corp., said that according to four computer-price databases he had examined, computers tended to lose 80 percent of their market value in the first year after purchase. Then their worth levels out for a year or so, he said, before plunging practically to zero. That hurts both individuals and institutions or businesses. In 1993, said Kenneth D. Campbell, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the university bought a supercomputer for its Laboratory for Computer Science that at that point was the 17th-most-powerful computer in the world. It cost $3.8 million. When the computer, the CM5, was shut down four years later, still the 497th-most-powerful computer in the world, he said, the best offer the university could get for it was $750. It decided to donate it to the Computer Museum instead. Museums and collectors, however, generally seek only rare and historically valuable computers. Strimpel, of the Computer Museum, said that any machine produced before 1960 was generally worth preserving; some from the 1960s, like the IBM System 360 series, are and some aren't.Received on Fri Mar 13 1998 - 05:31:13 GMT
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