[geeks] OLPCs for sale...

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 11:12:32AM -0600, Lionel Peterson wrote:

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

Our prototype units were 4x6 inches and we had two versions.

The original (around 2 inches thick) had a 233mHz National Semconductor
Geode processor (equivalent to a 233 mHz Pentium), 128m RAM and a disk
on chip "hard drive" from before they went to USB.

For demo purposes it used a 40g laptop hard drive, which required more
power than our batteries could handle, so we went down to a 4 gig drive
which used half of the power. It ran a modifed version of Red Hat Linux
version 9.
 

The second unit was thinner, around an inch thick and used a VIA 667 mHz
PII equivalent processor. It also had the same hard drives in it. We
never got it to run on batteries to speak of because our hardware person
became ill (and eventually died of cancer) before he could get the
batteries going. By that time, the hard drive had been replaced with a
USB stick running a modfied DSL (Damn Small Linux) with a lot of Linux,
DOS and Windows games.

There were two version 2 models, one with a 1/4 VGA screen and another
with a larger full VGA screen that swiveled to reveal a game controller
keypad.

The VIA chips were underrated for their heat output and needed fans.

There was planned a third unit with a Transmeta CPU, but we never got a
hold of one to build it.

The third unit which was also never built and it was planned to have an
AMD Geode (they bought the name from National) which was equivalent to a
1gHz Atahlon chip.

Battery life with a 2500 maH battery pack was without power managment,
estimated to be about 4 hours for the first unit and 1-2 hours for the
second. The third would also be 4-5 hours with either a Transmeta or AMD
processor. 

Note that the screens used for the prototypes used as much power as the
CPU.

Agressive proprietary power managment would have doubled or trippled
those times depending upon the games played.

Production units were planned (in 2004) on having 64m RAM and 64M "flash
RAM", and cost about $85 to manufacture in quantities of 10 million.

Considering that you can get 512m RAM and 2-4gig flash for what we were
going to pay in those days, yes you could easily run Windows 2k on
something the size of a VHS tape. In fact with more money for flash RAM,
you could run Windows XP.

Our prototype units had a standard PC BIOS, so it would not have been a
problem. Our production units would not, but you could load the public
domain BIOS that is used with QEMU.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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