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In computer news this week 01/16/2008 3 Essential Computing Plans for 2008 © 2008 Frank Delaney MTA Micro Technology Associates The PC is 33 years old this month – happy birthday. It’s hard to believe that any business today could operate without a computer, but I can remember talking to companies about personal computers here in Spokane back in 1980, and their standard question was “Why would we need a computer”. The first commercial personal computer kit, the Altair, was marketed in 1975 by the MITS Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and computing became available to everyone. In 1995 I wrote a History of the Microcomputer Revolution Series – celebrating the 20^th birthday of the PC - for my KPBX Raw Bytes Series, and it’s has since been used by hundreds of businesses and educational institutions since, and is available on my website for anyone to read. http://www.mtamicro.com/microhis.html The PC world evolved from the Mainframe Computer world. The Mainframe Computer world was very orderly and structured. The high priests of this Data Processing World protected their empires. There was a saying that if computer power was unleashed to the masses, eventually a roomful of monkeys would randomly type the King James Bible..... Unfortunately, the very good orderly rules, plans and practices of the Mainframe Computer world did not get passed down to the PC world. I worked for the Univac Corporation selling Mainframe/Minicomputers and learned these 3 essential plans that any computer operation should have in place: Data Backup Plan – All important data should be backed up regularly, and current copies of this data should be stored offsite. PC backup technologies have evolved from Tape units, to Zip Drives, to burning cdrom disks, and now to external USB Flash Drives and USB hard disks. You should have both an external backup copy of all your programs, and of your current critical data, offsite at all times. Emergency Recovery Plan – In the event the absolute worst happens to your computer system; fire, theft, whatever, you should have a plan as to how you could restore your programs and data to another computer to minimize your downtime. This means you should have another computer offsite that you could restore your backup data to and be in operation again. For most small business owners, this means your own home computer. An Annual Computing Plan – you should have an Annual Computing Plan which evaluates what hardware and software you currently have; what possible changes you might want to make in terms of replacement and upgrades; emerging technologies that might increase your productivity – like Windows Vista ; and what employee training you plan on doing. In the mainframe world, the planned ratio of expenditures for new computers and training was 1 to 1 – for every dollar of computers or software – you planned to spend a dollar for training. In the pc world, training costs are virtually forgotten in computer purchases. That’s why that shiny brand new computer never achieves its planned productivity – because no one budgets to teach people how to use it. So start off the new year with 3 computing plans, and I wish you a Happy Computing New Year !

For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2008 MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 mailto:frank@mtamicro.com