The future will be easy to use (fwd)

[Rev. Mark Grant]

On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Patiwat Panurach wrote:

> I feel sad when they say that the market for <1000 $ machines is nill, I 
> had so much fun and learned so much from my old machines.

Personally, I just bought a 486/66 laptop, which would have cost almost 
$1000 with 170 MB hard disk, 4 MB of RAM and Linux (I paid a couple of
hundred extra for a 500 MB disk)... I could have got a Pentium desktop
for the same price if I'd wanted one. So I don't see that there's really a
great advantage to a $ 500 diskless computer (and having worked on Sun
3/50s in the past, I know about all the disadvantages). 

ObCrypto/Security: My landlord bought himself a computer a couple of weeks
ago after he'd lived without them for over forty years, and has been
enthusing about how easy it makes it for him to do his accounts. He just
read about these diskless machines in a magazine, and his first reaction
was that there was no way he'd keep his accounts information on a remote
server. Obviously people *are* more privacy-aware than they're often given
credit for. 

	Mark