Free Republic

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?Wrong!While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway...

The Apple Lisa (1983) was the first successful computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) and a mouse. It cost $10,000. The GRiD 1101 is the grand-daddy of all modern-day laptops. It cost over $8000 in 1982. Their new VIC-20 (1980) was so embarrassing to parent company Commodore, that they considered giving them away. Instead, it sold over 1,000,000 units within just a few years, making Commodore hundreds of millions of dollars. The first portable Macintosh computer, the Macintosh Portable (1989) weighs 16 pounds and had a 16MHz processor. The first-ever handheld/palmtop MS-DOS "PC" was the Portfolio, sold by ---...

Supposedly, we face a major tech-trash "crisis." Too many Americans, according to a handful of in Congress, use their old home computers and other outmoded electronics as giant paperweights, storing them in attics, garages, and basements and "taking up space in homes and businesses." The "inappropriate storage of these things is not an option," said Rep. Mike Thompson, California Democrat, at a recent press conference. In the face of this calamity, he and three colleagues announced a new "working group" to educate Congress, apparently in the dark on the dangers of so called "e-waste" stored in homes or buried in...