[from Kevin Dean. BBC News, Village in the clouds embraces computers, Sci/Tech, 10/22/2001]:
``...in order to connect my village to the internet, I have installed two small hydro-generators in the stream near our village for power for the school.
We got some computers from Australia, Singapore and Malaysia as donation. I also collected some used computer parts in the US and took them to the village...I carried the parts in two suitcases. Most of them were 486 DX2 models and some Pentium I models, with Window 95 and Microsoft Office 97. I built the first one, showing the students and computer teacher how to do it it. Then they built the rest of them...'' (Mahahir Pun)
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See, I knew this shit had to be going on out there. And yes 486 DX2's were my favorite trash item for awhile. I found one in a vacant lot along with a keyboard and got it to work with some other miscellaneous parts and a monitor from the SF School District that was headed for the recycling center. At least three other boxes were just given to me by various people, including a 200Mhz Pentium that was faster than the one at home---which I promptly put in the shop for looking at LBO during lunch break---and occasional fishing reports for the boss (the fishing was generally poor out of SF this year). Recently we got several more monitors. I gave away all these boxes to get workmates interested in the unix---but of course they burned out almost instantly (the people, not the boxes). In any event, I took all the parts to work and they are getting re-distributed piecemeal as somebody needs an old modem, a hard drive, a sound card, a power supply, or a monitor.
The whole purpose of this project was to see if it was possible to build a network for nothing, or next to nothing from throw away computers and free software. The answer is absolutely. Technically it cost about two hundred dollars to get four computers networked, up, running, and functioning on FreeBSD---obviously with shared printer, e-mail, and internet. The main cost was hub, cable, connecters, crimptool, network cards, and some extra memory chips. Although I had something like ten old network cards, only two could be reconfigured with the right irq's and addresses to work, so I had to buy two.
It is good to hear that it is possible to do even in Nepal. Only in this case Mahahir should have used one of the unices---precisely because he could have networked them all together along with some diskless boxes and monitors (dumb terminals) for student use, and only had to manage one phone line out---and could have upgraded and maintained the system using CVS mirrors in either Russia, China, or Oz.
The real point to much of this is education, communication and community activism, and not the production of cheap exportable junior programmers and software engineers or creating new markets for M$. As for M$suck, hopefully some `after market' Chinese CDs are out there.
Chuck Grimes