As I See It...

An occasional commentary
by James E. Felton

July 23, 1997

In the process of spending parts of four days setting up a used PC I bought for a backup system I was reminded over, and over why I created this site known as Network Computer News - http://www.ncns.com/

First of all, the used PC I bought for $500.00 was a one year old Acer Pentium 75 w/monitor to which the owner had added a Zoom 33.6 modem, a Stealth 3-D video accelerator, and a Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick. The fact that I was able to buy all of this for $500.00 should tell you how much your investment in a new PC will soon be worth. A Network Computer that costs $500.00 new could not possibly depreciate as much as a PC.

Second, it took me parts of four days (of hair pulling fun!) just to get this PC functional for my purposes. Why? Because prior to selling it the previous owner reformatted his hard drive. Then he reinstalled the 3-D graphics card (improperly). The result of that was that I got home with a PC with no video. Once I got the video working, the picture was so bad that I couldn't see to navigate. And every time I'd boot it up it would run an Acer video, followed by the Acer desktop, followed by "Voice for Windows" software. Well I finally got the video working. Then I had to figure out which preinstalled software to keep, and which to toss (the three I just mentioned were first!). Then I had to copy my files from my primary PC to zip disks, install the zip on the "new" PC, and copy all the files to the new PC. My total set-up time for this PC was somewhere around 20 hours. At $30.00 per hour I make in my regular employment the set-up time for this PC cost more than the PC itself. A Network Computer will store my files on the network, or on Zip disks, in the first place, and will come already set up so I'll never have this huge waste of time that is always associated with PCs.

Third, hardware abstraction! Every new piece of software you ever install in a PC is being installed in an unknown device because every manufacturer uses different hardware in his PCs. So every piece of software you install in a PC has the potential to over-write the existing drivers (you know that little message you get that says the driver (or dll) you are installing is newer (or older) than the one on your system - what do you want to do?). Well, what DO you want to do? Who the hell knows? In an NC software cannot alter drivers or other hardware information. For more information about hardware abstraction visit http://www.ncworldmag.com/ncworld/ncw-06-1997/ncw-06-abstraction.html

Finally, Microsoft! If there has ever been a more crooked company in the history of the world than Microsoft I'm not aware of it. For that matter, if there has ever been a software company that made worse beta software I'm not aware of it. You don't even want to hear my Microsoft horror stories! (If you do, most of them are at http://www.concentric.net/~Jamesefe/)

So, I started this site, and called The Network Computer News because I believed that there has to be a better way. There has to be a cheaper way. There has to be a simpler way. There has to be a less crooked way. And I intend to help find it!

Have an opinion you'd like to share? Send it to me!

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