Jurassic lark: Dell IDs world's oldest PC
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Old computers never die, they just ... wind up in an attorney's office in Winnetka, Ill.
Or at least one very old -- no, ancient -- computer does.
It's a 22-year-old MITS Altair 8800b, and it has been churning out wills and other legal documents for John C. Shepard, 49, a patent attorney who bought it as a toy, quickly turned it into a word processor, and then poured $13,000 into the system for upgrades along the way.
Wednesday its advanced age earned Shepard a dubious distinction: He was named from among 209 other entries as the winner of a Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL) contest to find the oldest working PC.
Then again, age has its benefits. Shepard's old Altair, considered to be the world's first PCs, will retire in style: It'll spend the rest of its days in the Computer Museum of America in La Mesa, Calif.
And Shepard will start doing his legal work in technological resplendence: As the winner, he's receiving a Dell server and a combination of Dell desktop and notebook PCs worth some $15,000.
"I was just too lazy to convert," said Shepard in explaining why he kept using the machine way past the point of technological obsolescence. "I had all my documents on it." So even after he purchased other computers for other uses, when it came to word processing, "I just walked over and worked on the Altair."
Shepard said he bought the machine -- with its 2 MHz processor and 256 bytes of memory -- right out of law school, in October, 1976. Ironically, he spent about as much as he would have for a fairly high-powered PC today -- about $1,300. "It cost me a month's pay."
At first, "I'd stay up until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning playing with it -- it was like an expensive toy for big kids." Playing with it, back then, meant nothing more than watching its lights flicker; Shepard had no monitor, keyboard or storage for the first several months he owned it.
But then he began adding peripherals: a 9-inch monitor and a keyboard for $550, a digital tape drive for $428, a printer for $3,100, and a floppy-disk drive for $900.
All in all, he spent as much over the years as all the new equipment he obtained from Dell as the contest winner. His take includes a Dell PowerEdge 450MHz Pentium III server, a Dell Dimension XPS 600MHz Pentium III desktop, two 400MHz Pentium II Dell Inspiron 3500 laptops, a flat-panel monitor, a color scanner, a color printer and a fax copier.
What does Shepard, who works out of his home, plan to do now with all that gear. For one, he'll network his wife's laptop into the system. "I really need to be networked," he laughs, adding: "I can type 500 times faster now."
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