| Home | “Remember the days when a typical computer had two 5 1/4" floppy drives, but no hard drive?” |
For several years, during the 70s and 80s, I worked as a contract computer programmer for some of the world’s largest corporations such as Consolidated Edison, Citibank, and General Electric in New York City, and for the Ford Motor Company and General Motors in Detroit. I got my picture on the front page of the Detroit Free Press for being the “Michael Dell” of the Detroit area back in the 80s. In other words, for starting the Detroit area’s largest “mom and pop” computer business, selling custom made IBM PC compatible “clone” computers using parts made in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China.
CompUSA and Circuit City, the companies which put many “mom and pop” computer businesses out of business in the 90s, are now having trouble competing with Best Buy and Walmart. Best Buy / Walmart need not be very much competition, however, because all of the computers that they sell are inferior to a possible new breed of computers. Please let me explain.
Remember the days when a typical computer had two 5 1/4" floppy drives, but no hard drive? Until you booted up off floppy drive A, the computer couldn’t do anything! Things were so simple and understandable. My proposal is based upon the fact that removable flash memory is now up to 16 GB and rising, so why not build computers with no hard drive which are designed to bootup Windows or Linux off of removable flash memory? Then the entire bootup memory card could be copied to another memory card, so that the cards would be completely interchangeable! No more problems with hard drive crashes or hard drives that won’t boot! No more problems with computers that are set up in an unfamiliar way with an unfamiliar set of application software. Everyone could personalize their software so that whatever computer they were using would be 100% familiar! Each computer should have at least two identical high speed flash memory card sockets, a drive C and a drive D, in order to facilitate making exact, bootable copies of drive C.
Microsoft and the current computer manufacturers have painted themselves into a corner. They have created computers / operating systems which are unnecessarily expensive, complicated and difficult to maintain. They have to charge at least an extra $50 per computer in order to include an operating system. As low-end netbook prices fall below the $300 mark, an extra $50 becomes increasingly significant. Mom and pop computer businesses have trouble competing, because they can't negotiate big contracts with Microsoft to sell computers with a copy of Windows for only an extra $50 per computer. My idea would eliminate this problem by eliminating the need for including any software except a free operating system such as Linux and with the necessary hardware drivers for Windows, which are also free.
In order to get the ball rolling, a company in China, for example, could be hired to engineer a slight modification to netbook computers that they already manufacture. Then a relatively small quantity of these computers could be manufactured and stored in the USA. Samples could be sent out to CNET, Wired, etc. for review. Large online mail order companies such as Amazon.com and Newegg.com could be recruited to act as initial retailers. Once it was established that these netbooks are superior to all other netbooks, then retail store chains such as Walmart and Best Buy could be recruited to start carrying them. Then other models such as a regular laptop with an optical drive could be added to the line.
All that we have to do is to convince someone with deep pockets. Someone who has no contract with Microsoft. (Google?) There is currently a big opportunity to turn the computer industry on it’s ear, and to do a great service for all of humanity by making personal computers much more simple, flexible, reliable, and user friendly, and to revive mom and pop computer businesses all over the world!
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