Learn! You have access to thousands of articles and papers on every subject under the sun! You have the whole world at your fingertips. You can go look at a webcam and see what’s going on in Red Square right now. You could plan your next trip and see everything from local bus routes and schedules to hotel photos to restaurant menus. Figure out what kind of house you want - do virtual real estate tours. Visit museum web sites and do virtual tours of the art. Watch a news feed from another country. Check out the weather in Timbuktu. Heck, that box on your desk is a magic portal to the planet and beyond! Yesterday we were looking at NASA photos from Saturn on these ‘boxes’!
First of all, if all you ever wanted was to surf the net and talk with us guys, you overspent by about $500.
Ka-Ching! Too late! Enjoy!
I think it’s interesting to note how computer uses and how such uses are marketed have changed over the years. In the early 80s, when home computing got its start with Commodore, Atari and a few other players, the big sell was personal finance, games for the kiddies and word processing. Once the 90s rolled around multimedia was all the rage. The advent of CD-ROMs and sound cards as standard equipment dominated the advertising. If you’re clunky old 386 or first-generation 486 didn’t have these shiny new add-ons in it you were behind the times. These days you hardly hear the word “multimedia” in computer marketing. Once the Internet took hold in the mid 90s it was all about getting online and having email. By the year 2000 digital cameras were becoming more commonplace, so the marketing shifted to extolling the virtues of having a home computer for storing, editing, sharing and printing photos. Larger hard drives and more high-capacity portable stoage options allow for storage large amounts of audio and video. Nowadays the marketing is focused on high-speed (and wireless at that) Internet and all the things it enables you to do.
In short, computers can be used for just about anything you want them to do. All the things that could be done in the 1980s can still be done today, just better and faster, along with all the newfangled stuff that has come out since then.
Or get an emulator and run all your favourite old console games. An $800 computer should be plenty capable of running a Super Nintendo emulator, for example.