[geeks] OLPCs for sale...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at artell.net>
>Date: 2007/11/15 Thu AM 02:26:20 CST
>To: 'The Geeks List' <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] OLPCs for sale...

>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.

Based on a review of the specs here (and making a huge guess at the translation ;^), it looks like it was a 2.5" 20 Meg HD:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.newgeos.de/communicator/atari_9500/bilder/quaderno2.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.newgeos.de/communicator/atari_9500/quaderno.html&h=480&w=640&sz=61&hl=en&start=9&um=1&tbnid=nwIpohWO-Nxa8M:&tbnh=103&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dolivetti%2Bquaderno%26ndsp%3D18%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN

Assuming that "Festplatteneinheit" can be translated to some equivalent term like Hard Drive...

Lionel