A Short but fruitful history.

In the fall of 2003 I gave away my first computer. At the time I was working at Kids' Corps, Inc. and we received a couple of computers as a donation. One had Windows 98 and the other has Windows NT. After a couple of weeks of working on them I got them cleaned up and found some software so that they could be used. Soon I had more people requesting computers, using Kids' Corps non-profit status I was able to score several computers from the Municipality of Anchorage and a few more from a couple of local businesses and then began the torment. It was here with these computers that it became very clear that the big problem was not the computers but the software. Most of these computers had no software at all. What was worse I did not get any “driver disks” with these computers. This made each Windows install a major effort that included a lot of searching the Internet for hardware drivers. I came very close to ending the project as I could get the equipment for free but the Windows and related software was going to be the killer in both cost and time needed to pull everything together. Nearly all the Muni computers had no valid Windows license of any kind. Working from inside Kids' Corps, Inc. I could not under any circumstance pirate software.

It was at this time that I started using Linux in earnest and settled on SuSE as the best choice for these systems. SuSE Linux was what save this project – In 20 minutes of my time and I had a working computer with a complete software package and the best part it was cost free. Novel said right in their End User Agreement that I could give away as many copys as I wished. In 2004 I gave away 19 computers.

I had all the parts brought together to do this on a much larger scale. by the spring of 2005 I had the lead on well over a 100 computers and saw that I could not depend on Kids' Corps to get involved on this scale for what was outside of their primary mission. I was also finding many people willing to help and decided that it was time to set up a new organization to do this job. In August of 2005 I and three others came together and we started and incorporated Computers For All, Inc. as an Alaskan Non-profit corp.

In our first year of service we are now nearing 100 computers given out.

We are now moving toward our Federal 501(c)(3) letter.

Our Founders are