"When Vale Campos chose his components, everything had to be available on the Brazilian market to keep costs low. The result, he says, is a multimedia machine about half the size of a regular PC that 'might be cheap, but is not trash.'"
"He counts off the computer's attributes on his fingers: a 500-megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of main memory and 16 MB more on a flash chip that substitutes for a hard drive."
"There's a 56 kbps modem and the software is Linux-based and, therefore, free. Because the machine is modular, schools can link a series up to a regular PC that would act as a server."
"'What we did was imagine a PC and strip off the fat,' said Vale Campos, who got his doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University."
