Simple Inexpensive Mobile Computer: The Simputer

Sachin Karol links to this Time Asia report about the Simputer. A snippet from the article: "It's not a PC, but rather a microcomputer, a "Simple Inexpensive Mobile Computer." In short, a Simputer. It's the latest attempt to reach a kind of techno-humanist grail: a computer priced and designed for the billions of people who have yet to set foot in the wired wards of the Global Village. A computer, say its creators, for the masses." (Read more.)

A week ago, the prototype Simputer was successfully demonstrated at Bangalore's National Institute of Advanced Science. Here are some pictures from an earlier demonstration of Simputer prototypes; there is a section on the Simputer site which is supposed to show details about the architecture, but which promises more information by September of last year; there is information about the guts of the machine in the FAQ, though.

Sounds like a potentially useful tool, but how much impact do you think such a computer could have on the other problems faced by rural Indians? How much of the balance can be swung by such a device?

Re:I think the idea is cool, but the focus...

There is no clear focus for any of it. Do you think the world would be better if those engineers worked on a farm to feed the poor, rather than on computers for the poor? Do you have the real solution that people should be working towards instead of this?

There is no shortage of food on Earth. Most starvation is accompanied by war -- famine alone seldom causes starvation. Malnutrition is widespread, but is not due to a lack of food in a larger sense -- it is due to social upheavals in rural areas, social injustice, global food markets, etc., etc., etc.

If the food that exists was given to everyone fairly, then people wouldn't be starving anywhere. This computer is as much a step towards that (far off) goal as anything else. Free communication and justice go hand in hand, and this computer is a step towards that communication.

The FAQ mentions Bewoulf... and a surprise

This one took the cake


10.Can I create a Beowulf cluster using many Simputers?
You must be a /.er; in which you know the answer!

It's still too expensive

I mean, the thing is estimated to sell for 9000Rs, which is about $200 U.S. Considering the "minimum" wage in India is supposed to be around 2000Rs per month, and the actual wage people are paid is down around 1000Rs per month, then how the hell are they supposed to afford this?

Not the poor illiterate farmer...

...but the poor, illiterate farmer's son or daughter might want one, and potentially benefit from one. I'm very glad my mom had the foresight to buy me a computer in 1984; for me it helped lead me towards a well paid high tech career.. How about you?

World hunger and the Simputer

This is a great idea! I would love to see a computing device in the hands of every person on the planet. But first I would like to see full stomaches on all of them. How are they going to market these to people who can't afford to feed their children? [Free bag of rice with every purchase.] I am not saying these are a bad idea. Or that they cannot work. Hell, I would love to see them all over in countries that could afford them. But I believe that we should at least try and be socially conscience of the thousands of people who not only have never heard of a computer -- they are dying because of starvation.

Okay, I realize that I am endangering my karma here. I am taking a stance that may be seen as flamebait. But I really believe that this should be said by someone. But anyway, what are our plans to bring food to people who need it? Those should be more important than computers.

This is a specious argument. Everyone on Slashdot could sell their computers right now and send the money to feed the starving children. Guess what? Six months from now they'll -still- be starving.

If civilization waited until everyone was fed and happy before investing resources in new ideas, we'd still be squatting in caves. It's the investment in those ideas that makes real advancements in the quality of life possible.

Unfortunately, world hunger is a much harder problem to solve than building a Simputer. Making a Simputer is just a matter of engineering - solving world hunger is more an economic, cultural, and political problem than a matter of growing more food. However, building a Simputer might help some of the best and brightest in Third World countries help themselves, and in the long run that will be the only viable solution to mass starvation.

A final point for everyone to consider - are the creators of the Simputer overestimating the market for these machines? Remember the guy who created the hand cranked radio a few years ago? He designed it to bring modern communications to remote Third World villages. The problem was that no one in the Third World wanted to buy them (or could afford to do so)! Nowadays they sell them as camping gear in the U.S.A. Somehow I think the Simputer may have a bigger market in the First World rather than the Third World.

Not all poor farmers are illiterate

There's a lot of countries where that poor farmer is far from illeterate. Vietnam comes to mind as an example. They have a very high literacy rate. Of course $200 is still to high of a price for most of their population, but it's getting closer. Of course the fact that the OS is Linux doesn't matter much for them since they don't have any copyright laws there anyway.

mirror

Apparently they are trying to run the website off of the 200mhz processor that is going in these things. I'm slowly building a mirror up; it's taking 30+ seconds per http request with wget, so as I'm writing this only the front page and logo are there. But I'm trying to mirror the whole shebang.

http://www.perljam.net/misc/simputer/www.simputer. org/ [perljam.net]

-ted

Re:Real nice, but...

According to preliminary Indian Census [censusindia.net] 2001 results, India's literacy rate is 65%, ranging from 45% to > 90% , with literacy rates amongst the under 24 population significantly higher than amongst the older generation (up to 20% higher in the least literate states). In about 10 years, India's literacy rate will nearly be 80% with literacy rates above 90% in several states.



The number of illiterates in India has declined in absolute terms in the past decade, and thanks to both declining birth rates and increasing literacy rates, this will continue.



But what will the _literate_ farmers do with internet abled computers?



Check the prices of crops, and increase their income by avoiding the middleman.



Get weather forecasts, thanks to the Indian government's investment in satellite, imaging, and remote sensing technology.



Buy supplies online from companies at a cheaper rate than traditional middlemen.



Communicate with relatives in other states, and other countries more quickly, cheaply, and reliably than via "snail mail". Internet cafe's have started springing up in smaller towns and the Indian government is building a fiber backbone along the Indian Railway's right of way, which will make it easy for > 90% of Indians to get net access.



Communicate with Indian bureaucracy with much less pain.

reminds me

This reminds me of a dilbert cartoon when a vendor was trying to sell the most userfriendly computer in existance.

Vendor: And it only has one button, and we press it before it leaves the factory
Dilbert: What does that button do?
Vendor: Whoa! I'm in way over my head! Let me give you our tech support number.

This article just sort of reminded me of that. :)

May I suggest a better idea?

Maybe it'd be better to "seed" the Third World with inexpensive, minimalistic computers with the approximate capabilities of, say, an 8086 PC, or an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, but an architecture which is intuitively easy to program for. Price it at, say, $1.50 USD or so.

Let the people teach themselves to use these computers; they'll be forced to teach themselves how to program in order to do anything useful with the machines, (and it's a lot easier to learn to program on a computer that only has around 64k of RAM and, say, 512kb of storage space.) In about 20 years or so, the Third World will be a nation of budding hackers, cleverly designing their own IT infrastructure.

My sig is quite appropos to this situation.

----

$200?

While I like the concept, this can really be nothing more than a step in the right direction, not a destination (even an intermediate one). In the areas they seem to be looking, $200 is enough to buy food for half a year, if not more. The phrase "Hierarchy of Needs" springs to mind.

Children who are hungry don't learn, so in an increasing number of school districts in the US, breakfast is being served. Likewise, maybe an illiterate farmer or merchant would love to have one of these, once you've figured out a way for him to stop worrying about feeding his family this week (or this evening). Considering the progress we've made on THAT question over the last half a century, I'd guess that computers such as this, while a lovely idea, are at least 20 years ahead of being useful.

Of course, speaking of what $200 will buy, other than a useless piece of mixed circuitry, anyone care to speculate on what the $10M these guys raised and spent developing the things could have done for a typical Indian village?

Re:I think the idea is cool, but the focus...

what are our plans to bring food to people who need it? Those should be more important than computers.

First, the company making the computers is Indian itself. This is not a case of Western capitalist imperialism at work.

Second, the company isn't trying to hand out computers instead of food; it's trying to sell computers cheaply enough that they don't have to choose between it and food.

Third, the entire Indian subcontinent is not in the grip of starvation. There's a lot of perfectly well-off people there, and some of them are even technologically literate.

And fourth, you may as well have asked the same question about Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Amoco, Sears, Wal-Mart, the Pentagon, etc. They are all businesses, not charity, and their mission is to sell desirable products, not give away every cent they have.

What you are missing

I just want to make a few points here --
1) It's not a Palm, it's a full fledged Linux computer
2) They have applications with localisation in languages no standard OS supports.
3) Do u know how much it would cost to ship ur computers? And who would maintain all these different architectures/configurations etc.? Isn't that the same problem that schools in US have with donated computers?
4) Computers are given to villagers under govt. programs. So, not paying for the software is out of question. Individuals can and do pirate out there, but govt. cannot. There are copyright laws, it's just hard to enforce them.
5) Standardising the architecture and getting it out under GPL is a great idea to proliferate these things and reduce cost.
6) As, for using propritery OS, I thing being a /.er you do know the advantages of using a GPL OS like linux. So, I won't reiterate that.
P.S. Did you even read their FAQ?

Indian villages already use computers

There have been lot of questions by a lot of posters as to what would poor rural India do with this computer. So, I will try to explain here what's already being done and how this new simputer can help.
Let's get some facts straight here. In India the development is very uneven. So, there are a few states which are very poor and most which are ok and some really well off.
What's happening out there currently is that the ok and the well off states actually have started giving computer access to people in villages. As to what they use it for --- An example from actual usage -- A soyabean farmer finds out price of soyabean in chicago, because the price in chicago effects the price in India in a few months, so , he can decide how much to sow. Also, when he is ready to sell his soyabean, he finds out which market gives him the best price and rentsa atruck to sell there. A widow is not getting pension for her husband because of beauracracy, she goes to the village computer and pays 5/- (about 10 cents) to send an e-mail to an high up official. He responds and she starts getting the money. Both of these examples are real life and actually happened.
So, what this computer will do is that it will make usage of computers in regional language easy and will give them a cheaper linus computer rather then the Windows one that is more common out there.
See these links to find out more about how computers are changing rural India.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20010 409&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1
http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20001211/offtrac k.shtml

Love the FAQ

"14.What about Javascript?"
. "Doh! What about it?"

Gotta love question 10, too :-)

I think the idea is cool, but the focus...

This is a great idea! I would love to see a computing device in the hands of every person on the planet. But first I would like to see full stomaches on all of them. How are they going to market these to people who can't afford to feed their children? [Free bag of rice with every purchase.] I am not saying these are a bad idea. Or that they cannot work. Hell, I would love to see them all over in countries that could afford them. But I believe that we should at least try and be socially conscience of the thousands of people who not only have never heard of a computer -- they are dying because of starvation.

Okay, I realize that I am endangering my karma here. I am taking a stance that may be seen as flamebait. But I really believe that this should be said by someone. But anyway, what are our plans to bring food to people who need it? Those should be more important than computers.

No I am not perfect in this area. I give a little to help a person but not much. I am not encouraging you to go out and start throwing money at these people. But it would be great if we could find a way to have these computers help solve some of their larger problems.

---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,

Real nice, but...

...why does the "poor illiterate farmer" out in the fields need a computer? Just because you can mass-produce an inexpensive computer for the masses, doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in the masses actually needs one. Or wants one for that matter.