Not too long ago, I was at the liquor store and noticed in the back corner a box full of older computer parts. I asked the store owner about it and he said that's his old equipment on the way out. I offered him $20 for the lot and he accepted. At this point, I could no longer buy the vodka I wanted but oh well. The most noteworthy item in the box was a Dell Latitude CPx laptop in great shape. This computer has a 500mhz Pentium III, WinXP Pro, 256mb PC100 SDRAM, 14" screen and an 8mb ATI video chipset. It's a nifty computer but, unfortunately, it's a little slow on the internet. It's somewhat funny. I once used a similar Dell but with a Pentium II (Latitude CPi) when it was brand new in late 1999 and thought it was absolutely great. Use a faster model ten years later and it almost feels primitive. It's funny how computers go like that. They age like us. It's brand new and great at first and you never actually notice it getting older and tarnished, it's something you just one day see. Just as businesses in the computer industry seem to move faster than any other businesses (they come and go so fast, change focus so often and must continue to find something new by the day whereas most other businesses can go quite some time simply building one reliable product), computers demonstrate the same aging we go through but on a much faster and more visible scale.
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