Closing The Digital Divide

By | December 14, 2006
4 Comments

The low end of the computer market excites me as much as the high end. Sure $3,000 will buy a fantastic machine. But the guy with $3,000 to spare for a computer has, to some extent, already arrived finacially. What about the kid with just a few bucks? What kind of computer can he buy to help him get ahead?

A pretty good machine it turns out.

Last year I wrote about Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to provide $100 WiFi enabled laptops to children in developing countries:

It has been engineered to be very tough with a rubberized exterior. It can be powered by AC or by hand crank. One minute of cranking yields ten minutes of power. It has four USB ports and is WiFi capable…

[W]hy not offer this machine in the United States? We are a wealthy nation, but I believe there would be a market for super-cheap, rugged, rechargeable-by-hand laptops right here.

To some extent I think that the market is overtaking Negroponte’s project. It is possible now to find used $100 laptops on eBay that are comparable to his charity machine. Add a $20 WiFi card to the laptop in this auction and you’re set. No hand crank for power, but hopefully you can find a plug.

These low-end machines wouldn’t be the greatest game platforms, but the majority of productive work done in offices can easily be performed on these lower powered machines. Drop a free copy of OpenOffice into a 400MHz machine and you’ll find that you can run most spreadsheets and produce the same documents that the $3,000 machine will.

If you can afford a little more, you can buy last year’s model very cheap. I just purchased an HP Compaq NC8000 for $400 on eBay. It sports a 1.5 Ghz processor, 512 MB of RAM, a 40 Gig hard drive, DVD ROM/CDRW drive, internal WiFi, Microsoft Office, and an SD card slot (a key feature for me).

Closing the digital divide removes entry barriers to the information economy. It’s important not just to those clawing their way up, but to those who are already doing well. When the information economy grows, everyone benefits.

  • http://triticale.mu.nu triticale

    The guy with $3000 to spend on a new computer passed last year’s machine to his secretary, and her previous machine went in the office park dumpster. I dragged it home and am posting this comment from it.

  • http://www.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Triticale:

    heh.

    …which illustrates my point nicely. You get to take part in the brilliance that is The Speculist, and no one would have guessed you had to go dumpster diving to be here.
    :-)

    The “digital divide” has been crossed for $0. Bravo.

  • http://openoffice.blogs.com Solveig Haugland

    I’m glad you posted this, since it frustrates me when people talk negatively about how OpenOffice doesn’t have, say, the Split Column at Comma feature in a right-click option. I wish they would look at the big picture — the digital divide, changing culture, enabling small businesses to spend more on business and less on infrastructure, enabling schools to spend money on what’s important instead of spending too much on computer software–the list goes on and on.

  • http://triticale.mu.nu triticale

    Well in all honesty it wasn’t quite zero dollars. The office parks are in the suburbs and cannot be discretely dived when the busses are running. This means a car, preferably a decent looking one, is needed. I can write off the gas because I make my run after driving the wee wifey to church, but this approach is not directly available to the poorest of the poor. It also happens that I am using an optical mouse bought at a thrift store for a couple bucks.

    A couple years ago I passed on a dhove laptop running Win95 at 150 mHz to a wheelchairbound fellow I met at the library. I ran into him recently and he told me that the skills he honed on it opened the door to entry level employment in IT.