PCs for the poor: Which design will win?

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Third-World born and raised and I'd like to say...

...That no one gets it.

A US$50 machine will not get into the mainstream society of most TWNations. If they had US$50 to spend, they would spend it on something that would actually help them face the next month, week or day!

I got a computer science education in a TWNation! I taught myself BASIC in 1980! I taught myself Pascal in 1981. I taught myself C, Pascal with OOP and C++ in 1982-1983. I tried to teach myself Asembler between 1980-1983 and gave up! I taught myself DBase II, III, III+ and IV between 1982-1990. I taught myself a whole lot of things before graduating high school in 1983 or junior college in 1985 but I never owned my own computer until 1992 when I started at The University of the West Indies (UWI)!

My high school did not have a computer. My Junior college did not have a computer. UWI did have computers. They had Macs, a few Win machines, mostly terminals connected to IBM AIX servers or SunOS servers. They had BSD machines, GNU/UNIX and a Cray. Don't ask me what kind of Cray but they had one.

When I started at UWI doing CompSci, I was at the top of my class. Never owned a computer nor attended a school with one but I was well versed and knowledgeable. Yes, I did learn a few good things that I was unable (unaware, more like) to teach myself. The point is born in the question this revelation begs: how did I learn to program without owning a computer or having one at my school?

I mostly learned from books. Any book I can get my hands on. At first, these were no more than user's manuals from programing software or computers. The first was the user's manuals from the TRS-80.

I then borrowed manuals from people I knew who purchased Turbo Pascal, TP w/OOP, Turbo C, Borland C/C++, Ashton DBase (is that Ashton???) and anything else I can find. I then went to libraries, to my uncle's job (where he worked in IT), and every other source I can find.

Now when I wrote programs, I would either ask someone to lend me there computer so I can test my program, spending hours, days or weeks entering code, testing, debuging, correcting, etc. and once I got them to work, I'd say, "Hey, try this program for awhile then tell me what you think. How can I make it better? What would you want it to do?"

Now, if you want to get the TWNs into technology, what you need are books and access to computers. You do not need to give them ownership of computers. Just access. Mostly, you need to give them books.

A system to give people eBooks is great but you will still need to give them several terminals, not one shared keyboard/screen. Even then, it is a waste of power and precious computer time to have someone sitting in front of a dedicated US$100 piece of equipment burning 65W of power when they can be sitting with a US$10 book burning a shared 30W lightbulb. Better yet, the sun costs nothing.

Give us libraries with books. Give us computer labs with computers. They do not have to be the latest and greatest but give us stuff that works!

Finally, does it have to be Windows or can it be Linux? When I was at UWI, everyone in the faculty of Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Biology, Botany, Zoology, BioChemistry, Mathematics, Computer Sciences) wanted a Linux, BSD or UNIX box. Back then, the biggest thing was SCO UNIX because it ran fairly well on an 80x86 system. Why did they want Linux, BSD or UNIX?

Because those systems gave them greater flexibility and resources for learning. Once they learned with *nix, you can do anything. Of course, OS/2 Warp3 and later Warp4 came out and even those in the faculties of Social Sciences (geography, political science, business administration), Law (well, that was just law) Medicine (everything to do with medicine) and Arts (literature, history, visual arts, performinfg arts) wanted an OS/2 system. THe CompSci students were programming like crazy on that system popping out apps for everyone! Then Microsoft killed and buried IBM and the sheep went back to MS.

And the CompSci students all graduated and got jobs in Windows shops.

The point is, "if you give a person a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a person to fish, he learns how to corner the market, take over the entire supply chain, opens exclusive restaurants with exclusive marketing deals, drive the competition under, and dies a filthy rich bastard whom everyone hates."

You can give someone Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Office and they can go work where it is used. ...Or... you can teach someone about computers using any tools deemed appropriate and they can open their own business and take over the world! Buhwhuh ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, hah!

Anyway, that's my two cents worth. ...US$0.02 no less! ...and from a product of a Third-World education at that.

Posted by: The King's Servant   Posted on: 02/16/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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