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Simple Inexpensive Mobile Computer: The Simputer
Sachin Karol links to this Time Asia report about the Simputer. A snippet from the article: "It's not a PC, but rather a microcomputer, a "Simple Inexpensive Mobile Computer." In short, a Simputer. It's the latest attempt to reach a kind of techno-humanist grail: a computer priced and designed for the billions of people who have yet to set foot in the wired wards of the Global Village. A computer, say its creators, for the masses." (Read more.)
A week ago, the prototype Simputer was successfully demonstrated at Bangalore's National Institute of Advanced Science. Here are some pictures from an earlier demonstration of Simputer prototypes; there is a section on the Simputer site which is supposed to show details about the architecture, but which promises more information by September of last year; there is information about the guts of the machine in the FAQ, though.
Sounds like a potentially useful tool, but how much impact do you think such a computer could have on the other problems faced by rural Indians? How much of the balance can be swung by such a device?
How 'bout the name "Volksputer"?
Listen people. Here are some statistics for you:
- In 1999, 12 million children lived in households that did not have enough food and
2.7 million of these children lived in households that experienced hunger (3.8% of
all children). (source: USDA)
- Despite the booming economy, 31 million Americans continue to live in households
without enough to eat and a third of these households contain adults or children
who went hungry at some point in 1999. (source: USDA)
For more facts, visit http://www.hungerfreeamerica.org/As you can see, a sizeable number of children and adults go hungry in the USofA. But that does not stop people from working on pie-in-the-sky projects. If a country waited to abolish hunger before embarking on any other project, they would still be in the stone age.
The fact of the matter is, familiarity with computers (and the digital mode of operations) is a must for the workers of tomorrow. By giving kids access to this "Simputer", it will open their eyes to a whole new world. I'm willing to bet that many of us who were kids in the late 70s/early 80s got a big kick out of a Lisa/Commodore/Apple-][/Sinclair, and those toys of yesterday were what made us take up CS (or EE) as a degree. See, exposure to this stuff is important.
Moreover, this "simputer" is not the be-all end-all; it is a first step in a journey towards making computers accessible to all. Maybe after looking at this simputer some scientist in Brazil will come up with a better/cheaper version; maybe after a few such iterations, in a couple of years, we will have el-cheapo sub-$100 'puter which will spread this "digital wealth" around to the rest of the world.
And finally: $200 is not an unearthly sum for many Indians. India is ranked 5th in the world GDP Purchasing Power Parity.
Look at it this way: India's pre-capita income in 1999 was $1800. This "simputer" is 1/9 of that, about 1.5 months of salary. This is within the reach of, say, 50% of the Indian families. That means, within reach of 500 million people!
From the trade show pictures, this looks a lot like some of the existing PocketPCs already available on the market. How is this going to be better (cheaper/faster/etc...) than the existing products? Unfortunatly the architecture page consisted of a logo and a "ready by 9/2000" comment.
My biggest fear is that these people don't realize how complex lots of problems are, like how to provide a good interface for a variety of people. They may (like many computer language designers) try to sweep the complexity under someone elses rug under the guise of keeping it "simple". Will this thing have an programmers interface that requires you to do everything, or maybe hardware requirements that make even jaded manufacturers cringe? Or worse, are they going to force you to reinvent the wheel a lot by not including all of that "complexity".
Apologies to Larry Wall for stealing that metaphor.
Hopefully I'm way off base here and there was a link in there I didn't notice...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
There is no shortage of food on Earth. Most starvation is accompanied by war -- famine alone seldom causes starvation. Malnutrition is widespread, but is not due to a lack of food in a larger sense -- it is due to social upheavals in rural areas, social injustice, global food markets, etc., etc., etc.
If the food that exists was given to everyone fairly, then people wouldn't be starving anywhere. This computer is as much a step towards that (far off) goal as anything else. Free communication and justice go hand in hand, and this computer is a step towards that communication.
What can you do with a computer in the Third World?
Use text-to-speech to teach people how to read.
Store reference texts in a very dense manner -- most medical reference books will fit in less than 4 megs on RAM on PalmPilots.
E-mail to nearby villages for trade.
Web-based markets for farming goods.
Web-based road and travel conditions.
E-mail announcements of mobile health-care services coming to nearby regions.
Tolerance of poor phone lines -- make the computer retry every one hour until download succeeds.
I think the fact that it runs off on standard batteries is very powerful. The TRS-80 Model 100 did this, which proved very useful when traveling to regions without reliable power grids. The TRS-80 also had solar-panel power sources available for it... It would be nice if that worked here.
... and maybe this is why nobody's worried about competition from the Russian software industry...
"Beware by whom you are called sane."
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
You make excellent points. However look at it this way. What if this device helps in actually putting food in the stomachs of us Indians ?
We need to get out of the mindsets of computers being expensive. These cheap gadgets might just bring about changes in ways we haven't even dreamed about. You need to seed projects to find out if they will flourish. This computing device is not there to play Quake but to use to mine information. Information that might make a difference such as protection against common pests that destroy crops or extended weather forecasts. Information we take for granted is very hard to find in remote and economically poor areas.
And as far as specific things in your message go, for example, The Government of India gives free lunch to all children who attend free public school in the poor areas. The sad part is that people are so poor more children are sent to work in farms and shops than to school.
This one took the cake
/.er; in which you know the answer!
10.Can I create a Beowulf cluster using many Simputers?
You must be a
You don't seem to get it. Small closed computers like this one aren't very much to produce at all, especially if you're ordering them inquantities of hundreds of thousands. PCs have low margins because of all the components on separate PCBs. If everything fits onto a single PCB and you put as many logic units onto the same die as you can fit, you've got a really inexpensive system to build. Radio electronics are inexpensive as well which means setting up a radio packet network in rural areas isn't really THAT difficult. A bunch of ham operators could build a nice little network pretty efficiently.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So..when exactly did India become the world's poorest and most unfortunate company? According to the world bank they are the number 4 economy in the world in terms of GDP. So anyways. Why the Simputer? Why not pass out Gameboy Advance to the rural peoples of India? Most of the stuff you can do with these things could be done with one, to boot you've got a colour screen and the ability to play a bajillion Gameboy games. The good part is it only costs half as much and uses cheap alkaline batteries rather than NiMh ones. Rugedize the body on them a little bit and you'd be good to go. The Simputer is an awesome waste of money for everyone involved, the consumers are going to find too few uses for their 3 months worth of wages and the licensed manufacturers aren't going to move units in volume to make these things worth while to make.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If this helps India get the needed computing done without needing lots of foreign exchange, then I might have a big effect on feeding the people. If this lets school children be taught professions that will pay them a living wage, then it might have a big effect on feeding the people.
You are right. Someone who is personally starving is not personally going to benefit immediately. But if the economy of the country doesn't have to be twisted to pay money into the coffers of MS, then there has been a gain. That money is then available for other purposes, like agricultural development.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sheesh.
As Bill Gates pointed out, the majority of the people in the world don't need techno gadgets. They need health care and education. I'd add democratic governments and a reasonable ability for people to start their own businesses and profit from their own work.
Before the flamers start, I'm not a big-L Libertarian who thinks everything should be privatized and there shouldn't be a social safety net. I just believe in free markets being the solution to many (not all) problems.
Once these basic needs are met, we can start working on computers.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
--
Poliglut
People who ask questions like "What a poor illiterate farmer is going to do with it?" just don't get it. Unbalanced growth has costed india a lot already. India is the largest producer of food grain and milk in the world now. But because of poor infrastructure they can not be transported to all parts of the country in fast and cheap way. The roads in India are horrible. If India had in improving infrastructure too, then all the money and effort spent in increasing food-grain and milk production through the 'Green Revolution' project would have been more useful. India is trying to achieve 100% literacy rate by end of this decade. If cheap and easy access to information which Simputer would provide is not available by then then the literacy campaign too would be less effective. When you have 10 problems to sove with varying degree of importance and urgency, you don't make policy to solve the most urgent problem first, then next urgent etc. Ofcourse one should put more effort in solving the most urgent problem.
Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. -Dennis Ritchie
You may have to settle for seeing the full stomachs second. People with money don't starve. People who know IT are more likely to have money.
I mean, the thing is estimated to sell for 9000Rs, which is about $200 U.S. Considering the "minimum" wage in India is supposed to be around 2000Rs per month, and the actual wage people are paid is down around 1000Rs per month, then how the hell are they supposed to afford this?
Look at how poor people use other technological artifacts, and then your assumptions about what a computer is good for, and you'll get the answer.
Let's look at two examples: Televisions are not uncommon in the third world, although they are typically shared by several families. It's a link to the wider culture and sporting events.
Cell phones: A community may not have the economic clout to be wired for land lines. Cell phones are very successful and practical ways of linking poor communities to family members who have migrated overseas.
So, a poor farmer doesn't need to calculate ballistic trajectories, or process payroll, but they do need to communicate with family members, benefit from agricultural bulletins or public health education. And that's where most of the growth in computers has been in the first world over the last decade: the computer as a communication medium.
Also, consider the following example. In 1887, a boy was born to poor parents in Erode India. By a stroke of luck he had access to an elementary mathematics textbook out of which Srinivasa Ramanujan taught himself to be one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, the first Indian fellow of the Royal Society.
The potential for something like that is what makes the project exciting. Something as simple as cast off textbook made a huge difference in one person's life. There is a vast reservoir of minds out there in third world backwaters, and no doubt a few potentially brilliant ones that simply want connection to the wider world of ideas.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Marc Stiegler's fine book, Earthweb, but unless the users can understand written English (or I'm missing something, which is quite possible) I'm not sure how much it will do "for the billions of people who have yet to set foot in the wired wards of the Global Village."
OTOH, like it or not, English literacy seems to be growing rapidly, and perhaps that fact -- combined with services like Babelfish (if there's a Babelfish lite?) -- means my skepticism is not justified. I hope so.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
...but the poor, illiterate farmer's son or daughter might want one, and potentially benefit from one. I'm very glad my mom had the foresight to buy me a computer in 1984; for me it helped lead me towards a well paid high tech career.. How about you?
just my blog and pix
This is a specious argument. Everyone on Slashdot could sell their computers right now and send the money to feed the starving children. Guess what? Six months from now they'll -still- be starving.
If civilization waited until everyone was fed and happy before investing resources in new ideas, we'd still be squatting in caves. It's the investment in those ideas that makes real advancements in the quality of life possible.
Unfortunately, world hunger is a much harder problem to solve than building a Simputer. Making a Simputer is just a matter of engineering - solving world hunger is more an economic, cultural, and political problem than a matter of growing more food. However, building a Simputer might help some of the best and brightest in Third World countries help themselves, and in the long run that will be the only viable solution to mass starvation.
A final point for everyone to consider - are the creators of the Simputer overestimating the market for these machines? Remember the guy who created the hand cranked radio a few years ago? He designed it to bring modern communications to remote Third World villages. The problem was that no one in the Third World wanted to buy them (or could afford to do so)! Nowadays they sell them as camping gear in the U.S.A. Somehow I think the Simputer may have a bigger market in the First World rather than the Third World.
There's a lot of countries where that poor farmer is far from illeterate. Vietnam comes to mind as an example. They have a very high literacy rate. Of course $200 is still to high of a price for most of their population, but it's getting closer. Of course the fact that the OS is Linux doesn't matter much for them since they don't have any copyright laws there anyway.
They can call that little thing whatever they want but its still a PDA, which most people do not have. As of right now most people who want computers and can afford them already have one. If this device is intended for people who are currently unsure about buying a computer, the marketers are not very intelligent. People who are wary about technology are not going to be any more inclined to buy this than they are to buy an imac.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
http://www.perljam.net/misc/simputer/www.simputer. org/
-ted
The palm pilot was succesful because it was designed with the customer in mind. They put in exactly the applications that business-types needed to use (scheduler,etc.) and made everything simple. This made the palm very successful.
Simputer should follow palm's approach and build a "farmer's pda" - a pda designed from the ground up with the farmer in mind. For example, main menu links to information on the weather, agriculture, prices of crops. Applications to help farmers make better growing decisions. etc.
Unfortunately, from the screenshots, it looks like what they've done is slap generic linux (complete with X, command shell,etc.) onto a pda.
When I see that word, all I can think of are the Simps in Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.
But that's probably just me.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
The problems with donating old computers are:
1) It costs a lot to ship them there. Probably more than they are worth
2) The older they are, the more power they consume per processing unit. The StrongARM processor was designed to consume very little energy. And electricity is more expensive in India than it is in the US (though possibly around the same price as it is in Europe). India has some oil, but has to import ~ 80% of it from foreign countries, mainly in the Middle East.
According to preliminary Indian Census 2001 results, India's literacy rate is 65%, ranging from 45% to > 90% , with literacy rates amongst the under 24 population significantly higher than amongst the older generation (up to 20% higher in the least literate states). In about 10 years, India's literacy rate will nearly be 80% with literacy rates above 90% in several states.
The number of illiterates in India has declined in absolute terms in the past decade, and thanks to both declining birth rates and increasing literacy rates, this will continue.
But what will the _literate_ farmers do with internet abled computers?
Check the prices of crops, and increase their income by avoiding the middleman.
Get weather forecasts, thanks to the Indian government's investment in satellite, imaging, and remote sensing technology.
Buy supplies online from companies at a cheaper rate than traditional middlemen.
Communicate with relatives in other states, and other countries more quickly, cheaply, and reliably than via "snail mail". Internet cafe's have started springing up in smaller towns and the Indian government is building a fiber backbone along the Indian Railway's right of way, which will make it easy for > 90% of Indians to get net access.
Communicate with Indian bureaucracy with much less pain.
Well, there are a lot of those poor farmers who aren't illiterate. According to the CIA world factbook, India has a 52% literacy rate and 67% of the labor force is involved in agriculture. That means that even if every non-agricultural worker is literate then about 1/4 of the agricultural workers are literate. That's a pretty big market when you consider the size of India's population- just over 1 billion.
And, of course, a lot of those farmers may not want to stay as farmers forever. Remember that India is currently viewed as being a potentially big player in the computer industry in the future, so some of those farmers may want to learn about computers or have their children learn about computers to get in on the anticipated boom. Just because they're poor farmers doesn't mean that they're stupid, ignorant, or happy about being poor farmers.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
This reminds me of a dilbert cartoon when a vendor was trying to sell the most userfriendly computer in existance.
:)
Vendor: And it only has one button, and we press it before it leaves the factory
Dilbert: What does that button do?
Vendor: Whoa! I'm in way over my head! Let me give you our tech support number.
This article just sort of reminded me of that.
The anti-salmon
Why not start by setting up a PO Box in india where I can ship the seven perfectly usable PCs and Macs I have lying around not in use. and give these to a village as a central resource. One kid in each village would probably become a wizard and help the whole community. Everyone i know (exaggeration) is throwing out old PCs, these things become out of style but not functionally obsolete.
Why try to create some new OS standards when they will never be able to catch up to the development that goes into *nix, Windows, or Mac or even palmOS.
Even a proprietary OS company would be smart to say "hey India, use my OS for Free for five years" Add an extra one billion users to their user base to hit up for system upgrades in a few years. It's not like they are going to be able to track down that "pirate" farmer in Northern India and extract $100,000 for each infraction that i keep hearing about from that Software Protection Agency (whatever they are called..)
And why is there some implication that villagers that are illiterate, so somehow that makes them dumb? How insulting. Farming takes brains, shrewdness, planning and survival skills. Most of the posters on Slashdot are illiterate (just look at the mispellings and grammur ;) ) and there are programming geniuses amongst us. (I'm NOT including myself in that, foks)
I am not trying to be dissmissive or discouraging, but I really don't get it. If anyone can give me more info or explain what I am missing, I am all ears. I really don't get this. They are staking out territory in between a PC and a PDA and in six months will get squeezed out on features on either side....
Maybe it'd be better to "seed" the Third World with inexpensive, minimalistic computers with the approximate capabilities of, say, an 8086 PC, or an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, but an architecture which is intuitively easy to program for. Price it at, say, $1.50 USD or so.
Let the people teach themselves to use these computers; they'll be forced to teach themselves how to program in order to do anything useful with the machines, (and it's a lot easier to learn to program on a computer that only has around 64k of RAM and, say, 512kb of storage space.) In about 20 years or so, the Third World will be a nation of budding hackers, cleverly designing their own IT infrastructure.
My sig is quite appropos to this situation.
----
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.
Obtained from the fortune(1) database.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
While I like the concept, this can really be nothing more than a step in the right direction, not a destination (even an intermediate one). In the areas they seem to be looking, $200 is enough to buy food for half a year, if not more. The phrase "Hierarchy of Needs" springs to mind.
Children who are hungry don't learn, so in an increasing number of school districts in the US, breakfast is being served. Likewise, maybe an illiterate farmer or merchant would love to have one of these, once you've figured out a way for him to stop worrying about feeding his family this week (or this evening). Considering the progress we've made on THAT question over the last half a century, I'd guess that computers such as this, while a lovely idea, are at least 20 years ahead of being useful.
Of course, speaking of what $200 will buy, other than a useless piece of mixed circuitry, anyone care to speculate on what the $10M these guys raised and spent developing the things could have done for a typical Indian village?
First, the company making the computers is Indian itself. This is not a case of Western capitalist imperialism at work.
Second, the company isn't trying to hand out computers instead of food; it's trying to sell computers cheaply enough that they don't have to choose between it and food.
Third, the entire Indian subcontinent is not in the grip of starvation. There's a lot of perfectly well-off people there, and some of them are even technologically literate.
And fourth, you may as well have asked the same question about Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Amoco, Sears, Wal-Mart, the Pentagon, etc. They are all businesses, not charity, and their mission is to sell desirable products, not give away every cent they have.
I think slashdoters are quick to make comment and sometimes to quick
From what I read about the Simputer project it adresses (or aims to adress) a lot of the problems that people here are talking about:
It doesn't intend to sell simputer to individuals but to collectivities (villages...)
It will provide a simple graphical interface with text to speech in English and various Indian languages
The goal of the interface is to be usable by people who can't read or write (I'm not sure anyone has tried this before)
I consider a comment such as "they should feed their people first" to be more a spontaneous reaction than an insightful comment (not that spontaneous reaction is always bad). They consider that IT is important and that their people shouldn't be left behind, at least they're trying, give them credit for that!
A lot of people would be surprised of the extent to which IT is in use in so-called Thrid World countries, this is an interesting phenomenon and will surely lead to interesting results
It kinda reminds me of the old, ruggedized GRiDpad mixed with the old "tan and monochrome" Macintosh computers.
I've always wondered why monochrome couldn't be used just to cut the prices of things. Most of us don't really need the color, but it would be nice to have a cheap, hackable, portable e-book/tablet/linux device. Apps would probably take off with an open architecture and no licensing.
I think the Palm is great, but having some sort of half-desktop/half-PDA device that would allow more flexibility would be really cool.
Now, structured education of nearly any kind has been shown to allow people to take control of their reproduction, and the critical length seems to be roughly three years. It does not seem to matter in this regard whether it is the US school system or the Lybian school system-- the same results are seen.
Also many starving countries have infrastructures which are heared at export only because they were originally designed by colonial powers or by governments bought out by international export-oriented corporations.
These countries do not need food. Food which comes into the country reinforced the second major problem (export-oriented infrastructure). They need a functional network of roads and a locally controlled educational system, and it agrivates the first. Rather we should be mindful of helping these countries with educational needs (literacy) and infrastructure needs (roads, telephones, etc.).
I think that computers can provide such incentive by emphasizing literacy and telecomunications infrastructure. Then food can be useful.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I just want to make a few points here -- /.er you do know the advantages of using a GPL OS like linux. So, I won't reiterate that.
1) It's not a Palm, it's a full fledged Linux computer
2) They have applications with localisation in languages no standard OS supports.
3) Do u know how much it would cost to ship ur computers? And who would maintain all these different architectures/configurations etc.? Isn't that the same problem that schools in US have with donated computers?
4) Computers are given to villagers under govt. programs. So, not paying for the software is out of question. Individuals can and do pirate out there, but govt. cannot. There are copyright laws, it's just hard to enforce them.
5) Standardising the architecture and getting it out under GPL is a great idea to proliferate these things and reduce cost.
6) As, for using propritery OS, I thing being a
P.S. Did you even read their FAQ?
There have been lot of questions by a lot of posters as to what would poor rural India do with this computer. So, I will try to explain here what's already being done and how this new simputer can help.0 409&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1
c k.shtml
Let's get some facts straight here. In India the development is very uneven. So, there are a few states which are very poor and most which are ok and some really well off.
What's happening out there currently is that the ok and the well off states actually have started giving computer access to people in villages. As to what they use it for --- An example from actual usage -- A soyabean farmer finds out price of soyabean in chicago, because the price in chicago effects the price in India in a few months, so , he can decide how much to sow. Also, when he is ready to sell his soyabean, he finds out which market gives him the best price and rentsa atruck to sell there. A widow is not getting pension for her husband because of beauracracy, she goes to the village computer and pays 5/- (about 10 cents) to send an e-mail to an high up official. He responds and she starts getting the money. Both of these examples are real life and actually happened.
So, what this computer will do is that it will make usage of computers in regional language easy and will give them a cheaper linus computer rather then the Windows one that is more common out there.
See these links to find out more about how computers are changing rural India.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=2001
http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20001211/offtra
All the talk about technology reaching out to the truly poor is completely ludicrous. According to the FAQ this thing is gonna cost about 9000 rupees which is about $200 (USD). Of course this may seem pretty cheap to the average /.er but it is clearly FAR out of the grasp of the poorest people of the world, most of whom don't come close to earning that in a YEAR. If anything this is a computer for the "Third World" equivalent of the middle class.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
. "Doh! What about it?"
Gotta love question 10, too :-)
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
You equate these problems to not having a computer? Man, you need to get your priorities straight. I used food as an example; I believe that there are more important problems to be solved than getting a computer in everybodies' hands. I know that a bunch of people can work on a bunch of problems at once, but just how worthwhile would cable TV be if people try to get it out before their target buyers have electricity?
Seriously, I don't know what you are thinking.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Okay, I realize that I am endangering my karma here. I am taking a stance that may be seen as flamebait. But I really believe that this should be said by someone. But anyway, what are our plans to bring food to people who need it? Those should be more important than computers.
No I am not perfect in this area. I give a little to help a person but not much. I am not encouraging you to go out and start throwing money at these people. But it would be great if we could find a way to have these computers help solve some of their larger problems.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
...why does the "poor illiterate farmer" out in the fields need a computer? Just because you can mass-produce an inexpensive computer for the masses, doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in the masses actually needs one. Or wants one for that matter.
They had to call it "Simputer" because "IMac" was already taken.