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

[Matthew Montchalin <mmontcha@OregonVOS.net>]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Matthew Montchalin wrote:
|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.

Well, I'd like to have the stripped down version priced at $150.

||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.

And what's right.  You see, that's part of the initialization
procedure.  For instance, if the Box ends up saying "Waiting for
Port 1 Jack" the user knows that something is up right there.

|Oh, and the audio ins and outs would be through phone jacks, too.

Yep, phone jacks all over the place.

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

As for speech recognition, or maybe just whistle recognition, that's
a whole 'nother ball o' wax.  The manufacturer would be shooting
himself in the foot if he requires the user to input data (er, ah,
select games or applications) by whistling.