SiliconValley.com/AP: Brazil attacks digital divide with $300 Volkscomputer

[ Thanks to George Mitchell for this link. ]

"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."

Complete Story

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