I got a laptop in college in the fall of 2000.  It was a Compaq Armada E500 with a Pentium III 650 MHz processor, 10 GB hard drive, 128 MB RAM, Windows 98, and Office 97.  Within a few months, I upgraded to Windows 2000 and Office 2000.  After a few more months, I bought a PCMCIA wireless card and was hooked up to the then-brand-new idea of WiFi.  In another year or two, I upgraded to Windows XP and Office XP.  At some point along the way, my hard drive crashed, but it was under warranty, so I got a new one.  Five years later, this laptop was still running great and was pretty up-to-date.  Sure, I couldn't run any graphics-intensive games or extremely processor-intensive programs, but I could run everything from email to office applications to Unreal Tournament to SolidWorks.  My point is that my computer didn't really go out of date.  And it's still not completely out of date, although it's no longer with us.  It passed away from an unfortunate illness. 

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when computers would become obsolete.  Back in the days of Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, a brand new computer became completely obsolete in about 2 years.  And there was nothing you could do about it, unless you were super-smart and could replace major internal components.  The differences between a 1990 computer and a 1992 computer were unfathomable.  No new 1992 programs could run on a 1990 computer.  There wasn't enough hard drive space or RAM. 

These days, a computer from 1998 can keep up with the times because of the internet.  Without upgrading any hardware, a Gateway Pentium II 400 MHz computer (my parents' old computer) could still work.  Sure, you could get a computer that's about 10 times faster/better/bigger for about 1/5 the price.  But the point is that technology isn't progressing as quickly as it used to, and computers aren't becoming obsolete as quickly as they once did. #technology