Computer Literacy?

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If you can trust the "M*A*S*H" team, you already know that the entire universe needs a personal computer. Nevertheless, it still seems that for each person using his machine to calculate the national debt, there's someone else who can't remember why he bought it in the first place. Or at least it seems so to Bill Kelly.

Kelly, eyeing a landscape in which millions of PCS are collecting dust in closets or serving as extremely expensive doorstops (or cross-indexing recipes and balancing checkbooks), saw an opportunity. What's the answer for all these people and their underutilized hardware? Give them a magazine they'll need a computer to read.

So Kelly, a 35-year-old former McDonnell Douglas Corp. computer instructor, created UpTime -- the magazine on a disk. Each month, UpTime subscribers receive a disk that contains 10 programs. One or two, such as stories that deal with pending computer legislation, are just for reading. But most, such as the recent article on human longevity, are interactive. By answering a series of three dozen or so questions, a reader could determine when he might die.

On a more optimistic note, each disk also contains at least one computer game. At a subscription price of $79 a year, this works out to be less than $1 per program -- cheap by any standard. Providing software at low cost is what got Kelly interested in the idea in the first place. "I just couldn't believe that software companies could get up to $79 for a game, and hundreds of dollars for a business program," says Kelly.

So far, his Newport, R.I., Viking Technologies Inc. has attracted 30,000 subscribers and has grossed $2.1 million in revenues in the first six months of this year. Currently, claims the founder, income is close to break-even.

Next on UpTime? Kelly believes his product can deliver upscale subscribers to advertisers, meaning not even your computer screen will be free of commercials.