Slashdot Mirror
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
geoff lane writes "Ballmer wants a $100 computer. OK, can we build a reasonable PC for just $100 and a copy of Linux? The rules are: It's assumed that a monitor, keyboard and mouse are already available. Ethernet connectivity must be provided. All components must already have Linux support. All components must be new and currently available. The result must be electrically safe for the home. Is it possible?"
Didn't somebody hack a Gamecube to run Linux? I forget who hacked what to whom... I do remember that the Dreamcast could run Apache on Linux, and that's probably the cheapest console to get to run something like that.... if you can find one.
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
Sure with a free operating system you could probally pull of a computer with reasonable specs. I bought a 35 dollar computer that is a pentum 2 at 333 mhz. Then I upgraded the memory for about another 35. Then you upgrade the processor to a 733 for about 10-20 bucks. Well under a hundred dollars and still reasonable.
My UID is prime is yours?
it can be done.
the problem, is you're talking about a 300MHZ Geode, and a 8GB HD, with 64MB RAM, and an integrated video/sound/ethernet.
but, it can be done, and it can be done "profitably"
... hi bingo
You may not be able to find a decent PC for $100 today but it won't be long until it will go for $100.
My friend and I actually do this. You would be amazed by the hardware we find. Usually we will grab things (clean things, they are sorted so all computer things are together, in a neat area) and bring them back to test and examine what we want to keep. Generally we find P2's and many floppy drives as well as some great CD drives and the occasional great find like a P3 that was dumped for some reason. We've gotten a few decent hardrives larger than 10 gigs. Not to mention many good cases and monitors and SD-RAM chips.
With this you can throw together a linux router on the cheap, like you said: $0.00. With the free software and hardware we put together Cisco 2600 comparable routers for free, MP3 servers and have created various other uses.
We even got a Mac G3 once.
We plan on moving our operation over to a ricer part of towns dumps to see what we can find.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
We could do this today with no problem. The key is economy of scale. The Via EPIA platforms would be ideal, but they are too damn expensive.
Honestly, if some inexpensive Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer wanted to, they could do a 1ghz C3 EPIA platform, and really cut it down. One IDE channel. No floppy, serial, parallel, or PS/2 ports. Kill IrDA support. Basically, give it only the following:
1x VGA
1x IDE
4x USB
1x audio line out
The CPU and RAM chips could be soldered onto the board. Bundle it with a cheap mass-market OEM hard drive, a case with a 40W power brick, and you've got a PC.
Rather than VIA, one could use Transmeta Crusoe or AMD Geode. This could be done for $100, but the margins would be razor-thin. Hell, I'd pay $100 for one of these sans hard drive with a smaller power supply -- I'm a big fan of LTSP.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I dont need no stinking case
I was bored one day....
superman runs linux
plenty of tossed out systems running plenty fast enough to run something like AROS - Amiga Research Operating System
Its all about a small and efficient OS to bring life back to old hardware. Neither of which linux or windows is.
And it even has standardized user friendly level IPC, of which neither windows or linux yet has.
But AROS is currently lacking developers contributing to it.... and it is FOSS...
Yes, I do have the ability to do it myself, but too many times I've ended up re-buying parts trying to figure out some silly incompatability.
Obviously, this is less of an issue now than 5 years ago, but it is still a concern of mine. I guess, to me, it's worth the price.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Via already puts the CPU package on the mobo; it saves PCB space and power leakage. We're not going for a powerful system; just a cheap one.
Fair enough about your statement with the RAM chips, although if bought in big enough batches, stuff like PC2100 DDR is already absurdly cheap and isn't fluctuating too much.
And yes, you do save on the connectors. If the volume is high enough, you can design a southbridge that doesn't have the legacy support. Or, you could go the route that nVidia went with the nForce3 -- no southbridge. Just one chipset with everything integrated. With no legacy stuff, that just means you need an ethernet MAC, and audio CODEC, IDE (or better, SATA -- fewer traces), video, memory controller, USB and FSB. That's it -- it can be a pretty small and cheap chip. Use PCI express for everything -- you only need like 16 rails -- 8 for the video, 2 for the SATA and 6 for the gigabit NIC. Or better yet -- no PCI type bus -- just have everything tightly integrated with local like nVidia does thier ethernet, and offer open-source drivers.
The board could also be small with no legacy stuff -- smaller than ITX form factor.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
i can run firefox successfully with 32MB flash, and 64MB Ram. This includes baseOS, X, ICA Client, Terminal Client, RDP, and network and printing funcitonality.
it runs slow as molasses on a Geode, and firefox is exceedingly slow to start up on the Geode, but runs "ok" once its up and running. If you give me an 800MHZ VIA, things work much more gooder.
OpenOffice? its a bloated piece of crap. work needs to be done on that front. I dont think that i can get it going in less than 256MB.
... hi bingo
1) Go to budget barebone PC manufacturer like
;-)
www.ikonpc.com
or
www.tigerdirect.com
among many others
2) price lowest barebones case that comes *with* mobo, power supply, CPU
3) add hdd and one memory stick (as well as CD player if needed), do not add MS operating system, aftermarket software, video card, sound card, or other overpriced extras
4) pay between $120 and $150 with free shipping
5) recieve components and assemble your ultra low price computer (~2 year out of date)
6) ????
7) profit or something similar
Not quite at that $100 price point, but pretty close these days, and even closer if you are willing to pick slightly less recent CPU, mobo, and memory. And no, i am not an employee or in any way affiliated with these or other barebone PC manufacturers.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Why _load_ Firefox/OOffice when you can run it
in the ROM? It might run a bit slower, but the perceived responsiveness is often determined by application startup time.
- Why _boot_ a machine at all? I'm ok with developers' machines being booted, since they
stay up 27/7 anyway. But a consumer who wants
to check something on the Net or write a quick letter can't be bothered to go through a 3-minute boot cycle.
- Also, it can't hurt to modify the hardware slightly so that a LED indicates there are new emails even if the whole box is switched off, to save energy.
I hope I will live to see a real consumer computer that is as much an appliance as a microwave oven.The only idea that goes a little bit in this direction is modern BIOSes that have a built-in Web browser that doesn't need an OS.
--
Try Nuggets , our SMS search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
...when I worked in a computer store in West Perth called Computer Choice, for a chappie by the name of Ed O'Connor-Smith. After watching him sell a computer, one friend of mine took to calling him Ed O'Conman-Smith which was a tad unfair even though he could indeed sell ice to eskimos or charm a starving baby away from the breast. He once sold a million-dollar mainframe on someone's petty cash.
Ed sold an Osborne 1 to a lady called Pauline Winter (no relation to the actress AFAIK) of Maritana Typing Services, of which I can find no trace on the Web. Pauline had a top-of-the-wozzer Olivetti electric typewriter which would do a steady 75 WPM and had a 16,000 keystroke typeahead buffer. She beat it. Easily.
The Osborne 1 scanned the keyboard in software in its spare time, using its (at the time) grunty 4MHz 8-bit Z80, with pretty much inevitable results. So Pauline brought it back.
Instead of refunding her, Ed upsold her to a KayPro II, which was built like a lab instrument and had a separate microcontroller in the keyboard and guaranteed 3-and-a-half-key rollover. And 400kB 5.25" floppies in place of the shiny new recently-doubled-in-size 192kB floppies in the Osborne, and a full 64kB of RAM in place of the Osborne's 48kB. Your keyboard probably has considerably more storage than everything in the Osborne added together. (-:
Pauline sat in the shop for a few days, using the Kaypro to make sure everything went well. Her typing was like rain on a tin roof, there was no way you could hear individual keystrokes, but the funniest part was watching WordStar.
WordStar is a little priority-driven time-sharing little universe of its own. It had an event loop decades before Bill knackered the one in OS/2. If it has time, it prints stuff. If it doesn't, it at least updates the display decorations. If it has no time for that, it keeps the current text looking good; and if not all of the current text, then the current line, followed by the lines above and below outwards towards the top and bottom of the display. And if not even the current line, it echoes the characters as you type them, and the last-ditch response is to just store the characters and echo nothing.
With Pauline at the keyboard, WordStar was able to echo two characters out of 3 if it was lucky. Printing happened for a few minutes some time after the start of coffee break, and for maybe 25 minutes of a half-hour lunch break, and for many hours after she'd finished for the day. She was typing at least as fast as a top-shelf Ricoh daisywheel could, and that's fast. She started with a blank data floppy every day (two drives, one for programs and one for data), and usually filled about 3/4 of a 400kB floppy by close of trade, so I'd guess that was a sustained 110-120 WPM.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's interesting the way a lot of these threads are going here. A lot of what I'm seeing is, "Well, if you just need a word processor, then..." This makes me wonder if we should be focusing some effort in a slightly different place.
Maybe what we need is an operating system that "just does" word processing, web surfing, and e-mail. It would be a bit of a throwback to the old days of typewriters and workstations, but was that era really wrong?
Sun seems to be trying to encourage one mode of doing this - the blade terminal. But, I think there are a lot of companies who are very worried about taking such a big step toward this setup. Not only do you have to spend a bit of time getting the networking for that system right, but if you don't like it later, you suddenly have all of this hardware that is completely useless to you.
I think that if you could get the same setup running on the x86 machines that are already in place in most companies, and also show them how they could buy cheaper versions, that would still work perfectly if they ever chose to go back to their Windoze platform, then you would really have something killer.
I'm sure that there are now a few zealots screaming, "This is exactly what XYZ linux does!" I'd argue, though, that even linux in its current state is a bit more than what is needed. I'm really talking about a very non-general purpose machine that literally only does word-processing, web browsing, and e-mail. And, of course, the qualifier here is that it does these three exceptionally well and extremely intuitively. I think there are ways to start with a linux distro and write some extra application code to make this system happen, but it's not there yet.
Sigh, back to my current Windoze business life. Counting the hours until I can get home to my nice, debian-loaded UltraSPARC. :)