[geeks] OLPCs for sale...

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Lionel Peterson
> >From: "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at artell.net>
> >
> >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 ...

Ah.  

> 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)...

I don't think the drive was physically that big, but I don't really know.
It might have been something custom, since laptop-sized drives started
coming out about then, or soon after, IIRC.  Olivetti is was a huge company,
so they certainly had the resources to have something special.

> >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?

Some of those tiny things are pretty neat.  If I traveled a lot, and didn't
need a lot of computing horsepower when I was on the road, I'd certainly
have something like that.  My current laptop (a wide-screen Fujitsu) is
rather on the beefy side ... more of a portable computer than anything else.

My son has an old Nokia 770, the pre-keyboard model.  Smaller than a VHS
tape, really about a DAT-and-a-half.  Runs Linux, and does so pretty well.
Certainly good enough to do some web browsing, e-mail, and a half-decent SSH
session.

Amazing, these little boxes.

-Shel