Yet another reason to get angry with Bill...

Duncan Anderson duncangareth at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Mar 19 05:27:28 GMT 2006


On Sunday, 19 March 2006 02:50, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Sunday 19 March 2006 02:17, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> > > 500M is actually a lot, lately we are used to environments that
> > > take up 3G just to be compiled. 500M is slightly smaller than a
> > > typical drive from '98 and look at what we put on them then.
> >
> > Half a GB is stunning. I still remember when my Mac was a *monster*
> > because I had a 270 MB drive in there!!!
> >
> > I still remember <creak crack back breaking> when my Mac had its
> > entire GUI operating system packed onto a tiny fraction for a 400
> > KB floppy with enough room left over for one or two apps and the
> > computer had a stunning 128 KB of RAM!!! (and, for all practical
> > purposes it provided as much utility as a modern 3+ GHz machine
> > that's used for everyday work tasks (sans internet)).
>
> Har. I remember my first pc - 512K RAM and 10M disk. Before that was a
> Spectrum with 16k and a 48k wobbly adapter at the back that always
> fell off on the last statement of a three page program. Before that
> was the Mk14 with 512 *bytes* - every joint on the board lovingly
> hand soldered by your's truly.
>
> And before that it was hand threading toroid cores onto thin wires and
> 300baud acoustic modems that were so unreliable we had to whistle the
> notes into the mouthpiece to get a connection most times. At to get
> to school to learn all this we had to walk seven miles without shoes
> in the freezing winter and eat once a week. Oh wait, that's not true.
> That part's the fairy tale I tell my son to impress him. :-)
>
> But seriously, this OLPC project has tons of scope, an opportunity to
> make the Linux nay-sayers shut up and take notice.

Aha! You also had a Speccy! But seriously, I agree with you that this OLPC has 
a lot of potential. The biggest problem with getting these users onto the 
internet will be infrastructural, though. where I live there isn't even 
support for ADSL or 3G, no matter how hard you look.

cheers
Duncan

		
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