Greetings
three chunks
1) with an idea of making between 1 and 100 Million of these machines, presumably Squeak will run on the Linux OS, could a native version be written as well?
2) some links associated with the now gone Cybiko which has many of the requirements of the $100 project.
3) Windows98SE in 8MB - Linux is free, and robust etc,, however W98 has been arround for along time, is likaly to be suported and can be reduced to a tiny size,.....
Matthew
1) ---
The $100 laptop is being developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC),
OLPC is based on “constructivist” theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Google, News Corp, AMD, Red Hat, and BrightStar.
All three individuals and five companies are active participants in OLPC.
The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop, which initially is achieved via flat LCD screen, in later generation products electronic paper will be used (for example E-ink developed at the MIT Media Lab). In addition, the laptop will be rugged, use innovative power (including a hand crank), be WiFi- and VoIP-enabled, and have 4 USB ports. Its current specifications are: 500 MHz, 1 GiB of flash memory (no hard drive), SVGA 7" diagonal display, 128 MiB of DRAM. The cost of materials and assembly for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop
images of the design. --------------------- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Laptop09052.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Laptop09053.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6d/Laptop0905.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/Laptop09055.jpg
project web site http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
September 28, 2005 Move over Microsoft, Dell. The $100 PC cometh. From MIT. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1935&tag=nl.e589
$100 Laptop Effort Gains Momentum 09.29.05 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1865071,00.asp
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somthing simalar has been made befor;
Cybiko is a hand held computer designed for teenagers (although available and suitable for all ages, including adults). It has over 430 "official" freeware games and applications.
The CPU is an Hitachi H8S/2323 at 18 MHz and it also has an Atmel AT90S2313 co-processor at 4 MHz to provide some support. It came with 512 KB ROM flash memory and 1.5 MB RAM. It came with an add-on slot in the back, but the only hadware released was an MP3 player. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko http://www.geocities.com/cybikonation/pictures.html
and...
Inventor Plans New Computing Platform for Students By Jack M. Germain TechNewsWorld 02/12/05 1:30 AM PT
The new PDA will be more of a wireless communicating device than a computer. It will have a built-in peer-to-peer network that will not require the Internet for users to stay connected. However, it will also have full Internet browsing capabilities. Mark Menarik, CEO of Chicago-based TanCher, said the device will focus on maximizing the wireless capabilities for the educational market http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40471.html http://www.tancher.com/
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Windows98SE in 8MB!! ---------------------- The screenshot below is real. There is no disk compression, ramdrives or imaging utiltities involved here. Using our EOS software we performed an embedded installation of Windows98SE to a small 500MB hard disk. After booting to the explorer GUI our starting point was in fact a 17MB installation. All extraneous files were resolved and removed, leaving the smallest, leanest Windows98SE ever. It boots in seconds, is wonderfully fast and stable as a rock. Mind you it doesnt do a whole lot, though as you can see we still have the Explorer GUI and command environments fully functional. Serial ports, parallel ports, floppy, mouse etc - all present and accounted for!
Now if you think this is silly-small...you should see what happens when you use Microsoft's Drivespace compression with a 3x compression factor. No I am not kidding. Windows98SE on a 4MB Disk-on-Chip anyone? The screenshot would look the same, since the compression is transparent the OS would be reporting 8MB still - just the physical storage is halved. Works great though!
EOS Embedded Windows98SE has some huge advantages over Windows CE on an ix86 PC platform. A plethora of hardware devices are available with all the driver development done tried and tested. Standard software development tools abound and a wealth of off-the-shelf software are available. http://www.embeddingwindows.com/8mb_windows98.html
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