[geeks] OLPCs for sale...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at artell.net>
>Date: 2007/11/14 Wed AM 03:14:53 CST
>To: 'The Geeks List' <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] OLPCs for sale...

>Quoth Lionel Peterson ...
>
>> BTW, I got my Asus EEE yesterday, it's pretty good.
>
>[snip]
>
>> It appears to be pretty robust, and the form-factor is great 
>> - it is just as big as a typical O'Reilly book, and can be 
>> carried along with a couple books without needing a laptop 
>> bag. 
>
>Heh.  "It's all been done before, Watson."  In 1993, I reviewed an Olivetti
>Quaderno subnotebook for some magazine.  Folded out flat, it was 8.5 x 11
>inches, so in its normal "carrying" configuration is was book-sized.  The
>keyboard was 8/10ths scale, more or less.  It weighed 2.2 lbs. and ran on 4
>AA batteries.


You're talking about a bigger book - the Asus EEE is about the same size as the hardback edition of "Lying Liars and Lies they tell" by Al Franken (if you don't have a copy of that book, it is also about the same size as the hardback edition of "Men in Black" by Mark Levin - if you don't have either, well I am not sure what else to compare it to)...

Did they really run a full size (3 1/2") IDE drive off batteries? The images google provided seemed to show that (google "olivetti quaderno notebook" and select images)...

>Of course, it wasn't as capable a machine as the Asus.  It had some NEC
>processor which was basically a 80285, a 10 Meg HD, and all the connectivity

That's 80286 ;^)

>(like a 14.4 modem) was external.  The worst bit was the non-backlit,
>greyscale CGA screen.  MS-DOS, of course.
>
>Still, I rather liked it, and everytime I opened it up on an airplane, the
>guy next to me would try to buy it.

Libretto mail lists had similar stories - really, you can run Win2K on something the size of a VHS tape?

Lionel
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