The good ol' days - part 3

[Steve]

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At This Rate, Imagine How Much Dell Would Pay for an Old Abacus

By RODNEY HO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


On Oct. 9, 1976, John C. Shepard walked into Chicago Computer Store
and paid $1,330.35 for a MITS Altair 8800b, one of the first
commercially available personal computers.

Little did he know he would still be using the clunky, 50-pound
machine 23 years later. "It's worked like a champ, so why throw it
away?" he says.

The 49-year-old patent attorney beat 208 other entrants to win Dell
Computer Corp.'s search for the oldest PC in use by a small business.
The prize: $15,000 in new computer equipment.

Let others progress to the swiftest and most powerful. Mr. Shepard,
of Winnetka, Ill., remains linked to his relic, which lacks a modem,
hard drive and mouse.

Mr. Shepard had flipped on his Altair once or twice a week to print
out forms for wills, patents and real estate. "There's no easy way to
convert them over," he says. And he uses it for word processing. "I
only type so fast, and it still keeps up with me," he notes.

He owns a Pentium-chip computer for e-mail and Internet work, but
that by no means dims his love for his Altair.

With all the levers and blinking lights on the old Altair, a black
and blue box about the size of a small file cabinet, Mr. Shepard says
with affection, "it looks 'Star Trek'-ish, the way a computer should
look." He adds, "You want to see things happening."

When he purchased it, the machine lacked such basics as a monitor or
memory. Or a keyboard. Those bells and whistles he added the next
year. But it wasn't really useful for his business until 1981, when he
purchased a $3,100 letter-quality printer from the future founder of
U.S. Robotics, Casey Cowell.

Mr. Shepard says the Altair saved him from hiring a full-time
secretary, since he could quickly print forms that "looked like
someone put a lot of effort into it." He thinks this makes up for the
fact that he spent $10,000 over the years upgrading his Altair, "a
bottomless pit for money."

Ed Roberts, the Altair inventor who is now a rural doctor in Georgia,
says he's glad someone else is still using his creation. He himself
works on a Dell these days. "I like to try new stuff," he says. "I
don't spend much time looking back." An Altair sits in his office
only for show.

In exchange for Dell's prize, Mr. Shepard will relinquish his Altair
to the Computer Museum of America, a nonprofit organization in La
Mesa, Calif. "If it weren't for this contest," he says, "I'd still
keep it."

Copyright c 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 






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