"Power without the price" is still worth having

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Sinclair Research launched the ZX Spectrum, its first colour home computer. It's fair to say it revolutionized the market. At the time, it offered more bang for the buck than any of the competition. Commodore's VIC-20 had only 5K of RAM - 3.5K available for use - and a 22-character-wide display, for US$299.95. The Speccy was £125 for the 16K version and £175 for 48K; a year later, this was dropped to £99 and £129. In late 1981, Acorn's BBC Micro was £235 for the 16K Model A and £335 for the 32K Model B, but due to massive demand, that quickly went up to £299 and £399.

In the comparatively wealthy USA, Timex' versions did well, but locally-produced machines like the the Apple II ($1,298 when it was introduced in 1977) and the Commodore 64 (launched a few months after the Speccy for $595) grabbed the headlines. Plus, of course, there was the brand new IBM PC - whose smallest configuration at launch was $1,565.

It was another first for Sinclair. The ZX81 was the first home computer for under £100 - for DIY kit to built a 1K computer with no sound, graphics or colour. By 1983, Sinclair could offer a colour machine with sound - OK, lousy sound, but sound - for the same price. Result: it sold by the container-load. Where it wasn't on sale, such as impoverished Eastern Europe, the locals cloned it with enthusiasm. Some of the clones are still on sale today.

Sinclair achieved this by paring down the home micro to the absolute minimum. Unlike its competitors, the Spectrum had no sound chip, no dedicated graphics chip, no hardware sprites. It sported no industry-standard ports - no modem, printer or joystick ports, no RGB monitor port, nothing. It had connectors for a TV set, a cassette recorder (for storage), and an "expansion port" for additional peripherals. Even this was as cheap as could be - it was a row of contacts on the exposed bare edge of the single circuit board. It didn't support floppy disk drives, the dominant medium of the time - indeed, officially, Sinclair never did: it introduced its own, cheaper system, the tape-loop based ZX Microdrive, instead.

What it did offer was all of the core experience of an early-80s home computer: colour graphics and sound, the ability to write your own programs in BASIC and save them onto tape, and quickly, a large library of software. Some from Sinclair itself, some from its early ally Psion, and masses from third parties: mostly games, but also educational and business software. You couldn't run software from any other home computer, and while games on the C64 looked and sounded better, the core gameplay was exactly the same. Sinclair's BASIC had floating-point maths - indeed, unlike its rivals, for simplicity, it didn't offer integer maths - and included commands for producing sound and graphics. On a Commodore, you had to do that by direct manipulation of the video memory and sound chip. BBC BASIC was massively better, but then, the decent model Beeb was four times the price; the 16K Beeb was so short of memory it was crippled and it still cost as much as three Speccys.

So where are we now?
Twenty-five years on, if you want a new computer, you'll have to pay BBC Micro prices. The cheapest Dell system comes in at just shy of £385 if you want a monitor and Vista - and Vista in 512MB is not a pleasant experience. A bare machine with XP Home is still £250. You can get cheaper if you buy end-of-line kit from a dealer like Morgan's or Sterling XS or a refurbished unit from CRS, and you might be able to grab a bargain from your local computer shop, but if you want a new, name-brand machine, you're still talking several hundred quid.

Things have been a lot worse in between times - for much of the intervening couple of decades since the Speccy and the Beeb, a half-decent PC has been a grand or more.

But surely after a quarter of a century, the industry should be able to produce a cheaper home computer than it could in 1982? Let's look at that £250 Dell. It's a full-size desktop machine, complete with internal expansion slots - one PCIe x16, one PCIe x1 and one PCI. It has a 48X DVD/CD-ROM drive, a keyboard and a mouse. It comes with XP Home, a somewhat crippled OS itself, that's about £70 for an OEM copy on the retail market or £175 for a proper boxed copy - but you don't get an install CD with the Dell. It has onboard Ethernet, six audio ports on the back and two on the front. It's legacy-free, but still, it's recognizably a low-specced model of a generic office computer. Sinclair's designers would have had a field day cutting this thing down to chop the price. Let's have a look at what we could do.

A network port? If it's a home machine, a USB modem will get you on broadband or cable, so Ethernet can go. If the machine comes preloaded with an OS and apps, the optical drive can go, too. The user can always add a USB one later; meantime, they can download software from the Web. Expansion slots? Most ordinary people would never dare take a screwdriver to their PC. Dump those, too, and seal the case shut - a bonus to support staff. Put a hatch in the bottom, like on a notebook, so they can add RAM without opening the case. Speaker and mic sockets? Those are useless without speakers or a headset - but if you get USB speakers, the PC needs neither a sound chip or any of those eight sockets, so let's junk them, too.

Now we're getting down to basics. With no internal expansion, the users are limited to USB devices. That covers most things, even TV tuners and so on - but it's no use if they need Firewire or something, so let's stick in a Type III dual-Cardbus slot. That way, if they want, they can add internal Firewire, Ethernet, Wifi, a modem or all sorts of things - without tools. Even a nervous novice can slide a Cardbus device into a slot. For businesses, this means field-replaceable networking without swapping out the whole unit, and no need for easily nicked or broken external dongles.

With no internal expansion or empty drive bays, we can shrink the machine right down, too. Rather than a big hot desktop chip, let's use something small and cool-running, like a Via C7. We don't need the ultra-low-power C7M version: our box is going to run off the mains. Even so, a 2GHz C7 draws 1W on average and 20W peak, compared to Dell's 2.2GHz Sempron 3800+ at 62W. That means a smaller PSU and passive cooling - just bung heatsinks on the side of the case. No fans means silent operation, another bonus. It's not a games machine, so we'll go for dead basic graphics, maybe even stealing some system memory.

How much further can we cut it? Quite a bit.

If you only need a single-function box, you can save even more power and heat and noise by binning the hard disk. Leave enough room so that users who need storage space can fit an ordinary 3.5" drive - they're cheaper, faster and more capacious than 2.5" notebook drives, like that in a Mac mini. At retail, for £20 you can buy an 80G IDE drive now, which is a lot of space. But for £30, you could get a 4GB CompactFlash card. 4GB doesn't sound much today but it's enough room for Windows XP and some basic apps - and running off CF, the machine would be totally silent and shock-resistant.

To be honest, a lot of people probably will want an optical drive, so let's leave some provision for that. Make the form factor resemble that of an external 5.25" drive so that a DVD in an external case could sit on top. We could take a hint from the 1980s again and ape the hifi manufacturers' proprietary "midi" stacking systems. Hide an eSATA port behind a little spring-loaded flap and the drive could stack on top and connect directly, without external cables. The keen could even add multiple extra drives this way, while keeping the initial cost at rock bottom. Power the first drive from the base unit; for additional ones, use extra power leads. And of course they don't need to buy our matching drives - any old USB2 external drive will do. There are tons of those already. Another benefit from an external-drive sized case is space to fit an internal PSU. The Mac mini looks tiny, but its external PSU is half as big as the Mac itself and it has to go somewhere.

A silent, power-frugal 2GHz PC with a few gig of storage, skinnier and cheaper than a Mac mini, would be ideal for all sorts of business uses - point of sale devices, monitoring and control units, network terminals for undemanding users... all sorts of things. Why buy a thin client and be limited in what it can do when you can get a tiny, quiet full PC that's cheap to buy and to run? Make sure it supports netbooting and PXE for easy admin; naturally it'll boot off USB, so an engineer could wander around with a USB CD drive if the OS needed re-installing.

Of course, there's one more big economy we could make. Down at this sort of price level, one component you can't even see gets pretty expensive: Windows, even though OEMs pay much less than retail customers. What's more, comparing a low-end machine like this with a modern full-size PC and performance won't be scintillating. To keep the basic price down, we could offer it with Ubuntu for nothing - or Xandros or Linspire, if their new best mate Microsoft will let them. The latter two can handle proprietary formats like MP3, Flash, RealPlayer and so on out of the box, which you don't get with Ubuntu unless you add it in. Of course, it's a generic PC inside, so if people want to run Windows, they can. The retail version could come in two versions: one with 512MB and Linux for £100 and one with 1GB and Windows for £175. The same sort of split worked for Sinclair Research and Acorn - why not?

Yeah yeah, very nice. But why? The big question is, of course, who would buy it? Why would someone want a tiny, limited £100 PC when they could have a much more expandable one for £300 or so?

Well, not everyone can afford several hundred quid for something as non-essential as a computer. They couldn't in the 1980s and they can't now. As I've outlined, businesses could use a machine like this in lots of ways, but there's a bigger market of people who can't afford modern PCs. Not only the underprivileged of the Western world - and there are lots of them out there.

But beyond the developed world of the wealthy West, there are literally billions of people in Africa, Asia and so on, whose countries are trying to drag themselves into the twenty-first century. PCs, for better or for worse, are a pretty integral part of that. The $100 laptop - currently expected to cost $175 at first - is a laudable idea, but it's a laptop and it's intended for kids via government subsidies. Laptops are relatively fragile things and they lead hard lives. The XO-1 looks like a brilliant bit of kit, but it's too limited to run Windows XP on, with a 433MHz Geode system-on-a-chip processor, 256MB RAM and 1GB of flash. And for the price, it includes a keyboard, trackpad and an LCD. Our notional £100 PC can, like the Mac mini, do without those - they're already plentiful, cheap and widely-available. The dealer can bundle those, along with a screen, or they're easy to get on the second-hand market for peanuts..

Desktops - even tiny ones - are cheaper, tougher and easier to fix and upgrade than notebooks. But this gadget's starting to look suspiciously like a thin client, isn't it?

And there are absolutely loads of superficially-similar thin clients around already. A couple of the similar devices that have got some publicity recently are the Linutop and the Zonbu. They're tiny, they're low-power, they're inexpensive, but they're not really PCs. The Linutop sports the same processor as the $100 laptop - a rather gutless 433MHz Geode - and its only storage is a USB key. The Zonbu is a bit more potent, with a 1.2GHz Via C7ULV and hardware MPEG2 decoding for video playback. It's only $99 - so long as you buy a $13-$20 a month subscription for online storage on Amazon. The subsidised-by-a-subscription model didn't work for the turn-of-century "Internet Appliances" like the iOpener and I don't reckon it'll work now. Hackers find a way to crack it open, install a hard disk and use the device without paying extra. So give the customer that ability from day one!

One of the most powerful aspects of the PC is that it works on its own. You aren't dependant or beholden to anyone. No live Internet connection, no subscription, no server: the PC is a standalone device, where networking is optional. It's 2007: who wants a 200MHz computer, even if it is only £50? You can pick up such a machine for nothing off Freecycle. To be even vaguely competitive, a PC has to give reasonable performance and work on its own. Drop everything that isn't absolutely essential for operation, make it as cheap and cheerful as possible while leaving it capable of running current applications, and not only do you have a basic PC, you've also got a competent thin client for those who want it, thrown in.

I reckon the spec I've outlines is about as low as a PC can go and still be a general-purpose computer. And, like a Sinclair Spectrum, it will do most of the things its bigger, more expensive relatives will. OK, it won't be great for Vista or high-end gaming, but there are thousands of PC games from a a few years back that it will run with aplomb. It would be cheaper than a games console, as well as smaller and quieter and less power-hungry, and it would do a lot more. It's still enough to suck photos out of your digital camera, tweak them and print them. It's enough to download music and put it on your MP3 player. It's a full-function computer, just smaller and simpler. And simpler, don't forget, is a bonus to non-techies. Look at the original iMac. Sold like hot cakes.

Sir Clive's moved on to other things, like trying to get commuters onto cheap folding bicycles - which is a wonderful idea. But in these days of growing environmental awareness, I reckon it's time for a return to the 1980s values he pioneered: tiny, efficient computers which use a minimum of resources, both to make and to run, and which are as affordable for everyone as it is possible to make them.

They might be a hard sell against full-size PCs, but alongside the oh-so-trendy green angle, you could justifiably claim much lower running costs. I used to use old PCs running Smoothwall as ADSL routers, but compared to them, a modern hardware firewall saves its own price in electricity over the first year. It's a no-brainer. These would be similar. And something this small can be a cute little streamlined box - like a Netgear router - rather than a hulking great black and silver tower covered in buttons and sockets and flashing lights. Much more technophobe-friendly.

Now, all I need is a PC maker with a bit of nerve and daring... Anyone? µ