dacs.doc electric

IN JANUARY we were treated to a presentation reintroducing an old operating system and a full suite of applications tailored to both business and schools, all updated by a new company, NewDeal.

We have all been brainwashed by today's bloatware, those enormous space-hog applications containing all the features you'll ever want and a boatload more that you'll never touch. To make matters worse, you might even have to add more stuff, say, your special apps for word-processing, spreadsheets, databases, E-mail, and Web browser to have a fully functional system. With such gargantua flooding the market, you think you need the latest and greatest Pentium III / 500+ with a minimum of 128MB RAM and gobs of hard disk space to make even minimal use of the most of the popular (read Microsoft) graphic environment. Is this true?

Mark Tenny, NewDeal's able demonstrator, showed us that truth sometimes conflicts with popular beliefs. He showed us an operating system and an office and a school suite of applications with write, draw, spreadsheet, and database, contact manager, and day-planner modules plus a variety of fonts, clip art, games, and more.

Known as GeoWorks, the bundle was originally developed for the Commodore64 in the mid-Eighties and ported to the newly introduced IBM PC in the early Nineties. Enter NewDeal, who revitalized the software, remonikered it with the company name, and is now planning to release its fourth revision in the four years since it took over the package from its former developers. Each of its recent revisions has improved NewDeal's stability and user-friendly look and feel. Now it has added an HTML editor and Web browser and rolled it all into a $70 package, so tightly coded it takes only slightly more than 10MB of hard disk space, is happy with 640KB of RAM, and looks and acts like Windows.

Think about it. The whole windows-like environment and all the applications take up less space on your hard drive than MS Internet Explorer or Netscape alone, to say nothing of MS Office2000.

Kevin Welsh, NewDeal's missionary sent to solve the dilemma of the digital divide, provided the other half of the presentation, enlightening us to the possibilities this software provides. As well as running on the latest Pentium screamers, it also runs comfortably on the more than 60 million older 286 and 386 computers that yearly are rapidly filling landfills across the country as they are replaced by the government, corporate, and individual users.

Using NewDeal software, all of these abandoned computers can be recycled into Internet-ready PCs able to bring computer literacy to the millions of families, students and organizations on the downside of the digital divide. This solution can be introduced without huge investments, complex negotiations, or new legislation. And it can be introduced immediately, on a scale big enough to end digital apartheid in inner cities, rural communities, and in the Third World.

Corporations can take a tax write-off for the residual value of the old computers and the costs of refurbishing them. Schools, community centers, and nonprofit organizations can then provide the computers and PC training to the recipients. NewDeal knows this because they are proving it everyday, working with organizations that are providing computers to the more than 50 million U.S. households and the many countries that still do not have a PCs or access to the Internet.

Judging from the many questions that Kevin's presentation provoked, he really hit the mark by showing the DACS audience that by only upgrading software, NewDeal has been able to breathe new life into computers formerly believed to be obsolete. By reducing the load on landfills and providing computers to less-affluent portions of the world, it has benefited society and the environment in a remarkable two-pronged result.