Bill Bennett: “today Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and I are introducing bipartisan legislation with respect to the review period for…”

“today Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and I are introducing bipartisan legislation with respect to the review period for the sale of high-performance computers. Both Senator Reid and I were hoping this legislation would not be necessary. We had planned it as an amendment to the Export Administration Act, but that act, for a variety of reasons, has been stalled here on the floor, and the issue is so important that we don't want to let it die. We are introducing this legislation in order to keep the issue alive and, if necessary, to provide a vehicle for producing the review that we think is necessary. Let me display a chart that demonstrates what is happening in the high-tech world of business computers. These are not the computers that we carry back and forth on the planes. You and I, as we fly back to our homes, have laptops and those laptops have amazing capabilities in them and represent the changes that are occurring in the computer world. If I can be personal for just a moment, at one point in my career, I was the head of a company that was grandly called the American Computer Corporation. We produced, among other products, a computer that was about the size of a washing machine. We were very proud of it. It had 10 megabytes of hard disc memory in it, and it sold for about $35,000. It was literally built in a garage, and we sold every single one we could make.…”