A Conversation with Elizabeth
1998
New week

From:          LMixson LMixson@PEC.com>
To:            Elizabeth
Date:          Fri, 10 Apr 1998 08:50:50 -0400
Subject:       RE: Hello
 
I was thinking about email and the privacy issue and looked at hotmail. It looks to me that if you send and receive all your mail via hotmail then your work place can not access any of your mail messages as long as you don't save the messages on your local PC. This is because the hotmail "postoffice" is at Microsoft. It is true that they could monitor you while you are online to hotmail and see what you send/receive but that is much harder and more unlikely.
 
The tornadoes in Alabama were all over the news and front page of the Post. The destruction looked pretty bad. I was not aware that area had such tornadoes but the weather this year has been crazy.
The medical insurance requiring to choose a primary care doctor from their list is such a pain. I had Tun into the same issue as you did of picking a doctor having them say they were not taking any more patients. Changing jobs the way I have makes it even worse because each company has different insurance companies and not all doctors sign up for all the insurance companies so I have to go through the process again. It looks like the doctor we have been using is a member of my new company's insurance program so I won't have to change. It does not matter as much to me which doctor we use but Julie is very particular. We found this young woman doctor a few years ago and she is really great. For the average stuff seeing a woman doctor was not big deal but the first time I went in for a physical and had go through the cough test it did make me a little nervous. But she was very professional about it.
 
You might be surprised about the price of computers these days. I spent $2,500 for my new system last June but now you can get the same system for about $1,500. There are a lot of new systems for around $1000 that are pretty good but I would plan to spend around $2,000. A lot of that goes into the monitor. I got a good 17 inch display. I love the 20" displays but you end up paying $500-$700 more and did not feel it was worth it. They now have new 19" displays which, as you would expect, are in between the 17 and 20" in size and price. You might want to try going to the www.dell.com web page as they have a nice on line configuration and pricing program. (I bought mine though Dell).
 
I have to run as I am going downtown to the ATF for a short status meeting.
 
Larry

This was the first Dell computer I bought. It was a pretty decent system, not the latest generation of processor as it would have added about $300 to the cost.

Dell Dimension XPS M200s
Processor:           Intel Pentium 233 MMX
Memory:             32 MB
Hard Drive:         3.2 GB
Floppy Drive:      3.5”, 1.44 MB (see storage media over the years)
Zip Drive:           Iomega 100 MB drive
Video Card:         Matrox Millenium II, 4 MB PCI
Modem:               US Robotics 33.6/56 K
Audio card:         Creative Labes AWE32
Monitor:              Dell Ultrascan 1000TX Color
Speakers:            Altec ACS290 with sub-woofer
Windows 95
MS Office 96

Note the Zip drive in addition to the “standard” 3.5 inch floppy drive. I really liked the Zip drive because of its increased capacity over the 3.5 inch floppy but Zip drives never caught on and later both floppy and zip drives were replaced by writeable CD drives.  For Internet access there was the dialup modem card which had a direct connection to a phone line unlike my first computer that had an acoustic coupler. [link] I got the upgraded sound card with good speakers that had a sub-woofer which I used on later computers until 2023 when it finally died. Windows 95, now three years old was the lasts version of Windows and was a big improvement over the previous Windows 3.1. By this time I had switched from WordStar to using Microsoft Word and Excel.
 
In the following years I would buy a new computer about every three years. My current system is a Dell XPS 8960 with 16 GB of, an Intel 13th generation processor, and a 2 TB hard drive.  Computers had come a long way since 1997, my current computer has more memory than the hard drive on my first system.

Work