Can you really get a respectable computer for under five hundred dollars? The answer is yes. I'm Fred Fishkin with Bootcamp, a report on computers and technology. A new computer maker called emachines, backed by two South Korean firms that have been building monitors and computer components for years, has found a way to put together PCs for 399 dollars. With a monitor, the price is one hundred dollars more. To be sure, these aren't the fastest computers you can buy, but emachines president Stephen Dukker says for a lot of families, they are the first that are affordable...

"If you look at the common denominator of almost all PC owning households in the United States right now, it's almost all of them are household incomes above fifty thousand dollars. There's an additional 20 percent, or about eighteen million households, which want PCs, but quite frankly, can't afford them."

What emachines is offering for the money is a good deal.. A Cyrix M2 266 processor, 32 megs of RAM, ATI 3D video, a 24X CD ROM drive, a 56K modem and a software bundle that includes Windows 98 and Microsoft Works. The speakers for the sound system are tiny, but those can be easily upgraded....

"This machine makes no apologies for anything and although it's not the fastest machine on the market, it includes and utlizes every single piece of the latest technologies from the CPU to the 3D."

You can find more information on the web at e4me.com.