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Yesterday was probably the strangest of this year. A customer contacted us looking for a laptop for her daughter, who it transpired, is resident at my old University hall of residence. This, I'm afraid brought on another bout of memorabilia. One of 486 and Pentium computers, all of which were only released 10 years ago. In a decade, this micro processor, it's motherboard, storage devices, Visual Display Unit, keyboard, mouse, memory and add on cards have all become obsolete- to such an extent that they won't even do the simplest of tasks for the vast majority of end-users. My Thesis was written on an Apple Mac Performa 400 and Viglen 586. Although not quite cutting edge for their time, both machines simply would not be able to function in this decade. They lack the simplest of parts, that we have bcome so used to- and even reliant on. Neither machine would be able to communicate with USB memory sticks, digital cameras, firewire hardware or serial ATA drives. Neither their hardware, nor operating systems would be able to communicate with such equipment, meaning they simply don't have a place in the majority of our society. This of course leads me to that of Recycling these obsolete machines. You see, the industry is awash with companies and traders vying to offer their services. My thoughts last year were that there would be a consolidation in this market, based upon a finite source of obsolete computers. Having considered the position 10 years ago and then fast forwarding, it appears that rapid changes in the I.T market and quick obsolesence of new hardware, coupled with a significant increase in computers distributed throughout the world means that we may not have enough resources to deal with our recycling needs. I recall my first visit to New York over a decade ago. The city was awash with technology shops, trading in Computers and hardware. On my second visit, this had grown to include cyber cafes, in and around fifth Avenue, right in th middle of Manhattan. How on earth are we going to recycle all this hardware when its obsolete. The logistics of removing it from New York City will be a major headache in itself. I contemplate driving into the heart of this sprawling suburb each day, leaning out of the window and shouting 'bring out your dead computers'. As the number of computers around the world grow in number, so the resources used in their production reduce and material prices continue to increase. It's a difficult time at the moment, what with China swallowing up resources for their continued growth. Gold is now at an all time high and continues to increase un-abated. I think that over time, we'll realise that there's value in recycling. It reduces the cost of our new hardware in the long run by providing the resources needed to produce the computers, monitors and printers we so desire.
Article Source: http://www.articles4sites.com
The Author is editor a website promoting computer recycling for Manhattan and New York state. He is also actively engaged in promoting recycling.
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