Brazil wants to built a cheap computer for access to the internet for its people.
Business: Brazil rethinks the budget
computer
By TONY SMITH, Associated Press
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil (March 4, 2001 11:08 a.m. EST
nandotimes.com) - Hard disk? Who needs it?
Windows? Why bother? Floppy drive? Forget about it.
The small, transparent acrylic box sitting in Sergio Vale
Campos' office at the Federal University of Minas Gerais has
none of the above basics, but it is still a computer.
What's more important in Brazil, where the digital divide is
a gaping abyss, the machine's lack of frills should mean it
can be produced for about 600 reals, or $300. It is a PC for
the people, a Volkscomputer.
Late last year the government commissioned Vale Campos'
team to design the low-budget machine as a response to
worries about worsening the country's social and economic
inequalities by starving the poor of information technology.
The computer had to have a modem, a color monitor,
speakers, a mouse and simple Internet-browsing software.
It also had to be modular so users could later add a printer
or disk drives.
By early February, a prototype was ready and later this
year, once software hitches have been smoothed out, the
government plans to install the stripped-down machines in
public schools and sell them to low-wage earners on
installment for as little as $15 a month.
Installation in public schools alone will give Internet access
to 7 million children.
"We realized this was not a First World problem - we were
not going to find a Swedish or a Swiss company to solve
this for us. We would have to do it ourselves," said Ivan
Moura Campos, the project's mastermind and no relation to
Vale Campos.
In the United States, a cheap PC might go for $500, but
that's expensive in Brazil, where the minimum monthly
wage is 150 reals, or $75.
"If everything we are planning becomes reality, and we
manage to produce this at 600 reals per unit, we will be
creating a new base of some millions of new computer
users in Brazil," he said.
Brazil, with its 170 million people and $580 billion gross
domestic product, is Latin America's largest economy. Its
3.9 million regular Internauts, as Web surfers are called
here, mean it also accounts for about 40 percent of Latin
America's Internet users, according to a recent study by
eMarketer.
Still, most Brazilians don't earn enough to have a phone
line, never mind a computer.
When Vale Campos chose his components, everything had
to be available on the Brazilian market to keep costs low.
The result, he says, is a multimedia machine about half the
size of a regular PC that "might be cheap, but is not trash."
He counts off the computer's attributes on his fingers: a
500-megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of main memory
and 16 MB more on a flash chip that substitutes for a hard
drive.
There's a 56 kbps modem and the software is Linux-based
and, therefore, free. Because the machine is modular,
schools can link a series up to a regular PC that would act
as a server.
"What we did was imagine a PC and strip off the fat," said
Vale Campos, who got his doctorate in computer science at
Carnegie Mellon University.
The main difficulty was configuring hardware and software,
he said, because "many pieces automatically assume there
is a hard drive and here there is none."
Now all the government needs is somebody to build it.
Local industry executives have hinted they might not be
able to build the Volkscomputer for $300. According to
Moura Campos, their first response to the government was
$600, about $400 cheaper than the current price of a
budget PC.
But he says a producer will be found, thanks to tax
incentives recently enshrined in a new information
technology law. Others are not so sure.
"Equipment is getting cheaper by the day, but I'm not sure
the market price for this minimal micro will really be 600
reals," said Carlos Afonso, development director at the Sao
Paulo-based Network for the Third Sector.
"And in addition, it's not enough to have a computer - you
have to have somewhere to connect it to," he said,
referring to a nationwide shortage of telephone lines that,
in any case, are normally too expensive for most
low-income Brazilians.
Afonso is convinced the short-term solution must be
"collective" public Internet access centers.
Last year, Brazil's postal service launched Porta Aberta, or
Open Door, a project that gives the public free access to
Internet kiosks, but only in selected post offices in Sao
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
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