Introduction

For years Mike McDowell refused to buy a personal computer.The 38-year-old McDowell, owner of a 1,200 acre farm in Wisconsin, told his disappointed children that they would just have to use the computer at school. The family simply could not justify the expense of a computer in the home. "If I buy a new tractor," he noted, "I can make the farm more profitable. But a computer? I just can't see it."

He can now. Mr. McDowell took a look at the new price tags. As personal computer prices ducked below $1,000, they attracted a whole new audience of home users. In fact, more than half of new computers are purchased by first time buyers. In addition, computers are continuing their winning ways: Almost 80% of computer buyers are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their computers.

Mr. McDowell ticks off the uses his family has found for the computer. He took a class at his local community college & learned to use spreadsheets, a kind of rows-and-columns report, to plan his crop planting & rotations. He uses the computer to send for weather & crop reports fro agencies of the federal government. His wife favors e-mail, which lets her use the computer to send messages back& forth to her sisters in Duluth & Sioux Falls. His teenage daughte, who wrote her high school reports using a word processor, saved her summer job earnings to buy a laptop computer to take with her to college. Mr. McDowell now counts himself in the "very satisfied" category.

Thats it for today, see ya next post.