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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

The cheapest computer you can put together iswhatever people give you or 
throw out.  Most of our desktop computers are P133 or more recnetly P166. 
We recently set up one of our real prizes for a friend (P200 with 48M RAM 
that you cannot add to).  Our laptops are not as good as this.  We are 
trying to putBL1 onto the 486 with24M RAM and the others will stay DOS 
only.  We cannot add RAM to a laptop at reasonable expense.  



> 
> When I look around at the surplus gray market, I see that the cheapest
> platform you can put togather these days is *at least* a 233mhz that'll
> take pc100 dram at 20$/128 megs. 500mhz cpus can be had for 20$ also. I
> have a 700mhz with 384megs DRAM on a motherboard I bought to 25$. The
> parameters of 'the cheapest platform' you can buy now is not a 4meg 486;
> and I'm glad bl-2 is around to keep them out of the land fill. But
> nobody is bothering with the warehouse space so that they can sell them.
> 
> But a 500mhz with 128 megs is perfectly capable of running a decent web
> browser, which is the killer app these days. Anyway, with dram so cheap,
> it seems perfectly reasonable to me to park the browser and the OS in a
> ramdisk, and not havta worry about internet sabotage software at all.
> Because- *DOS* has the file system of the drive you boot from, and its
> way too stupid to know what to do with a virus.
> 

We used tohave a large collectionof DOS viruses that came in boot 
sectorsand spread like wildfire via bootdisks.  But I guessthey don't come 
over theinternet.