Computers Can Be Had For Free

I have a secret to share. For the past five months, I have been living a lie. I have consistently sent over 500 e-mail messages per month. I have faithfully imparted my wisdom through this column. I have continued to work as a user assistant, helping people with their computer problems. But all this time, I have not had a working computer myself.

It all started back in the summer of 1996. The town was Cambridge, Mass. Our hero (me) was living in Winthrop House, participating in a Phillips Brooks House Association program when an electrical explosion in the basement of Quincy blacked out all River Houses and fried both his hard drives.

After painful and expensive visits to CompUSA in Brighton, I decided to invest in an Iomega zip drive. Never again would I fall victim to hard drive failure.

So the 1996-97 school year passed without much incident except a floppy drive failure. My life was full of computer glee: file-sharing, paper-writing, Duke Nukem playing glee.

Then the summer of 1997 arrived. First, I noticed my power supply had failed right at the beginning of the school year. So I replaced it. Then my one-year-old hard drive failed.

Now ordinarily, I would have returned the drive to Western Digital under its three-year warranty, but having been lazy in backing up data to the zip drive, there is still information on the hard drive I need, so I refuse to return it.

I also refuse to spend a dime.

Where does that leave me? I had been relegated to the status of a lab-user. I got e-mail only three times a day and actually waited in line to use a computer in the Science Center. Well, I never!

This had to end. So I called on the power of Grayskull for inspiration and determined all I really needed was a simple terminal so that I could access e-mail. The search was on for a cheap PC. (This is where you start hearing the Mission Impossible theme music.)

I sent several postings to the local newsgroups, harvard.marketplace and mit.bboard, but then I remembered that I had no money. So then I sent pleas to those lists asking for donations of a hard drive of any size, so I could at least install MS-DOS. Funny, no one replied to that one.

Then it hit me. Some computers are so old and despised that people would actually give them away. This past Saturday I acquired five such relics: four 286s and one 386. The fastest of these (the 386) was 20Mhz, kind of sad considering I recently helped a friend purchase a PC ten times as fast.

I set to work dismantling and rewiring, and blasted Bob Marley all the while with my door wide open. I was in my zone. At 3:08 a.m. yesterday morning I telneted, logged in and sent the first e-mail message from my room in 1998.

My makeshift desktop PC may not be the latest and greatest of computer technology, but it's all I really need, and it was free.

So what have I learned from all this, and just where is the advice in this tech column anyway?

I'm getting to that. There are two basic lessons I've learned and think it worthwhile to share. One, never underestimate the power of a backup. Two, don't assume you have to spend top dollar to satisfy your basic computing needs.

On that first note: for only $200 you can purchase an Iomega zip drive on which you can save your most important data files. These drives and their 100MB disks are also useful for storing large files like sound and video clips for easy transfer.

More importantly, there exists a scaled-down version of this option that costs you nothing you haven't already spent.

Everyone with an FAS account has just over six megabytes of storage reserved for his or her personal use (except for commercial use, of course). Assuming the computers you use are all connected to the Harvard network, you can upload files to the home directory of your FAS account and download them whenever you need.

There is no chance of picking up a virus along the way, and you don't need to worry about losing the file as long as your account is active. Floppy disks, on the other hand, are notoriously unreliable and are likely to fail.

Even if you must spend money, whether to optimize, repair or purchase a new computer altogether, take a serious look at such on-line marketplaces like the newsgroups I mentioned or the Harvard Computer Society Marketplace at www.hcs.harvard.edu/market. You'll definitely save.

Baratunde R. Thurston '99 is the Claverly Hall user assistant for Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS), a Harvard Computer Society project leader and a Crimson executive.