The Fonly Institute

SuperHappyDevHouse

When I saw in the San Jose Mercury News that SuperHappyDevHouse was trying to "recapture the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club", I knew I had to drop in on their event. Having designed the meeting process of Homebrew in 1975 and run the meetings until we closed up shop in 1986, I wanted to be sure that legacy was not being misrepresented. So, along with Lena, I turned up at the Hillsborough house June 23rd where the sesqui-monthly hacker play party was scheduled to take place.

I knew it was going to be a zoo, having been announced on the front page of the business/technology section of Silicon Valley's newspaper. What I wanted to see was what the zoo would be like. Checking on the web page earlier that day I saw that the count had peaked at 116, a new record.

A Minor Enlightenment

(This is not commentary on OLPC - go here to start that thread, which continues to December 2006)

I recently visited the MacWorld exposition and found myself making the familiar trudge through the aisles, glancing left and right while attempting to absorb and judge what I was seeing. I've done this many times before and it always seemed that my experience of hell would be of walking through an endless trade show.

Of course, I've seen worse (the late un-lamented Comdex a few years before its demise was a warren of tiny booths all showing the same bits of junk that were of no use to me). I took in the gigantic presentation by Apple of their iPhone and came away convinced that Steve Jobs had pushed through a most impressive piece of human interface programming, though all of an evolutionary and not revolutionary aspect.

Fortunately, I found myself in line buying an overpriced sandwich immediately behind a good friend of mine, and we sat and talked as we ate (there were many more opportunities to sit at MacWorld than at other trade shows). He directed me to the back hall where small companies had tiny stands with new products, or products that were almost ready.

There I ran into something very interesting. A tiny new company named Unicon was showing their tiny devices (about half the thickness of a deck of playing cards, with about the same profile) that were built to function as media handling devices, for want of a better word. Each had a small quarter-VGA (320 x 240) color LCD screen with a Linux (2.6) computer built onto the rear of the display using flex circuit technology. The design had two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 2.0 "mini OTG port for PC connection" - OTG standing for "On The Go" and referring to a dual-mode (A or B) dynamically configurable USB port allowing it to connect to anything except another OTG peripheral (which would have trouble deciding which protocol to assume).

Comments from Intel

Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel, has made the following comment on the OLPC:

"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop--I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," Barrett was quoted as saying at a news conference in Sri Lanka. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful," added the chairman of the world's largest chip maker. "It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. We work in the area of low-cost, affordable PCs, but full-function PCs, not handheld devices and not gadgets," he added.

This comment strikes me as a fairly superficial remark which begs for more explanation. Intel is one of the early companies to make some serious commitments in the area of device and systems design for the developing world. No one knows what the definition of "gadget" is here, and no one knows how Intel knows that "full functionality" (a term whose definition keeps changing) is what "people are looking for".

Intel is working in the area of infrastructure, with a serious focus on wireless, so I would conclude that it is paying close attention to OLPC, recognizing the damage to the market that could be done by OLPC as currently conceptualized. But stay tuned for further developments - if OLPC looks like it's going forward, Intel will probably negotiate a place in the food chain. After all, OLPC now says that they will require all schools to have Internet access, and this is something Intel is positioning itself to provide.

Of course, one thing no company wants is the necessity to enter a vast new market everywhere at once - this has been the death of many a company that's tried it. Intel is nobody's fool, and one likely outcome of this game would be that they set the pace of OLPC implementation by the pace of their network extension activity. But since the expense of that effort would be significant, the pace will more likely be set by the availability of extra money for network extension.

At any rate, since Intel will be in the best position to control the rate of OLPC introduction, it will be in the perfect position to phase in its own solution in a compatible fashion. This would be perfect confirmation of one of Ted Nelson's many dicta: "Everybody wants to be second".

(My original post on this topic has been pushed below the level of visibility on the menu).

Now for a message...

I came to Tunis in search of business. Fonly was established as a vehicle for engineering work related to the class of village-scale telecomm-capable systems which devolve from the system I defined and prototyped for use in Laos by the Jhai Foundation .

Since performing the initial prototypîng of the system intended for Laos, we have concentrated our efforts on solving the problem of sustainable sub-kilowatt electrical power for such systems. The Jhai system was blocked from installation in Laos for unclear reasons and the system which devolved from that design has been put into service on the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona.

In the meantime, we're open for business in the area of eletronic circuit; device and system design. I bring upward of 35 years' worth of experience in product design qnd development to the table, along with a way of approaching problems that places the user of the center of the design process.

My discipline is electronics (analog, digital, microprocessor, control, medical) and we can assemble teams as required to address the full range of problems in any project

Lee Felsenstein
l