Re: Computer Bank and Co-Op

[Ry Jones <rjones@moscow.com>]

OK. Let's talk turkey here. There are two ideas under one topic:
1) Computer Bank. If I was running a charity and someone tried to unload 
anything less than a pentium on me, I'd not take it. When I worked at (one 
big company), we had about 400 386 systems we needed to unload. There was 
no charity that was interested in ever part of them because the service for 
these old boxes was expensive. We ended up raiding for parts and 
landfilling them. When I worked at (another, different company) we had a 
stack of older Sun boxes... ipc, ipx, 4m, and the like about waist high, 
five feet wide and 40 feet long. Nobody would take them, we ended up 
letting the employees in the department raid them and take home what they 
wanted and landfilling the bones. Charities need machines that help them, 
not flaky hardware with no modern support.

2) Computer Lab. These types of co-ops are big in other cities because they 
provide people with casual access to computers. East Palo Alto has a paper 
shop (think Kinko's) with internet access at $1 an hour or some such. I 
don't know how many of you are familiar with EPA... let's say it's a rough 
area and be done with it. There are lines of people waiting to get access 
to these computers. What I proposed in my first email is something I'll 
probably do on my own, anyways, but on a very small scale. I have one extra 
computer ("extra" in quotes there) and I've been trying to think of a way 
to give people access to it without tying up all my time answering questions.

One idea that I kicked around some time ago was buying an old semi trailer 
and putting a computer lab in that, and groups could rent it out for 
classes or whatever. What a suprise when I found other companies doing 
exactly that.

Bah, humbug.
--
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will
look upon the Act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
   -- Gandhi