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

[Stephen Shaw <xstephenx@apple2.org.za>]

Yeah but we DON'T want a PC. Geddit?

On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 13:53:30 GMT, Beyonder wrote:

> You people are insane.
> for $300 you can get a high end pentium 3 system, loaded.
> for $100 more you can get a high end 1.4gig system, loaded.
> and these are retail prices! that doesn't include monitor, but who
> cares?
>
> get with the times.
>
> B
> On Fri, 13 Jul 2001 12:49:42 -0700, Matthew Montchalin
> <mmontcha@OregonVOS.net> wrote:
>
>>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.

-- 
Microsoft Works ? What are we listing oxymorons?