Re: If you could design a $300 homecomputer today, what would you choose?

[Matthew Montchalin <mmontcha@OregonVOS.net>]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, T.J.T van Kooten wrote:

|For the sake of argument let's suppose you could design a next generation
|$300 homecomputer. The goal is to make a userfriendly machine for general
|use and for hobbyists. How would such a system look?

A box with a whole bunch of ports that all looked like 'phone jacks'
and was intelligent enough to tell the user (with a speech synthesizer)
what was available at each port.   If you needed to pass through more
data than usual, just use more phone jacks.  Yep, phone jacks all
over the place.  Just about *anybody* can figure out how to plug jacks
in.  But it is very human to plug the wrong things in to the wrong
sockets, so use the speech synthesis to tell him what's wrong.  Oh,
and the audio ins and outs would be through phone jacks, too.

And when it powers up properly, and is sufficiently initialized, says
something like "Computer Okay."