Bill et.al.

We run our net connection on POTS. We did get a second line at our last relocation, so we can talk and type at the same time. I have 3 main machines connected on a 10Base-T (etherlink) LAN. One of our two printers is also "LAN wired," although a second printer runs off the parallel port on one of the machines. My etherlink "box" is an 8-port, so it has spare ports where I can plug in either or both of our two laptops.

Web connection is from "her" Win2K, with any/all the others connecting via the built in "Internet Connection Sharing." (Which incidentally worked just as well when "her machine" was one of the Win98s). The flatbed scanner is on "my" (Win98SE) USB port. She has a CD burner that I installed in the Win2K machine, but I have a second hard drive in my machine so I don't have an IDE port left for a burner. I plug the "new" laptop (WinXP) into the LAN and use its burner if she's busy on her machine.

My first "home-owned" machine was an 80286 state of the art "screamer" that whipped along on a 4.8MHz processor (in 1981) on DOS 3.1. It was $5,023 out of the box, and came with a 5.25 360KB floppy drive and a 32MB hard drive. I added a 5.25 HD, a second hard drive, and had to "upgrade" to CGA monitor and card to use some graphics programs I wanted, and added the then unheard of 1 MB add-on RAM on a memory board. (The maximum installable with DOS 4.5, which I'd gone to by then, was 2MB due to address limits. Windows 1.1 came with the mem card, but there was no software to run on "Windows" then.)

By the time I junked that machine, I believe I calculated a hardware "lifetime cost of ownership" of a little over $13,000. (About $100/month.)

The situation has improved gradually, but today you should be able - if you get a full-suite software package, double the RAM, and get a generously sized HD - to get an "out of the box" system for $2K to $3.5K that will last you 5 to 10 years with virtually no necessary add-ons. It looks like a bargain to me - but you do lose all the fun of sleepless nights running diagnostics, looking for new accessories, etc.

And of course the "piddle price" goes up if you're just curious and want to do things that "the herd" doesn't do. I do still get that urge, occasionally.

John