Christine; True, a minimalist box with enough to do letters and browse the web could be had for a few hundred $. In effect you will have a spectrum of machines from the hand held Newintons to others that interface to printers and the web at very low cost. Gates sees this and his OS for smallhand helds will extend to this area. If the boxes are complete with the high speed serial port, they can be docked into what ever you like, via cable, infra red, or hard docking, to make a full machine.
I have a small tecra with a docking station and a 21" monitor, and when I am portable I am light(not that light), and when docked easy to read/type and....
There could be a family of boxes all with a common OS(stripped down for the palm tops) from the minimalist palm top to a full desk top, with many stops in between, and the ability to incrementall go up that path at will. Go to the store, take the palmtop. Go to school, take the palmtop and a dosking station, that when together is like a laptop. At home a larger docking station and monitor is a desktop. All networked, able to stand alone or interconnect. I have not fully thought out the mechanics of this, but I sense a viable concept.
Some overall OS is needed, and I suspect microsoft is it, as they have the only one that encompasses this span. Not logical to have varied OS here. Apple might work, as they are good at interconnectedness, from the Newton up to the latest Apple OS8??
Bill |
