You'll be surprised if you find an actual PC with 486. I have installed XP on a Pentium II machine with 256MB of RAM and it was barely usable even for web surfing. Without bells and whistles: scrolling simple text+picture pages in IE/FF was very slow.
Launching any non-trivial application also took terribly long. Not just the Office, but even Firefox felt more like Photoshop. I couldn't believe how bloated the software had become.
These $100 machines you're talking about can't run normal software, you'll need Microsoft to start selling Win98 or you'd need a stripped-down Linux with XFCE or something. The key to performance IMO is smaller binary sizes: those CPUs had tiny caches and pathetic memory throughput. Pentiums ran on 33-66Mz FSB, compare it to 1066Mz of modern machines.
Isn't it amazing how software bloats and slows down so that it only fits the latest generation of hardware?
We were doing web browsing of the simple text+pictures kind back in the early 90s. Word processing and spreadsheeting has been done since the late 70s, early 80s (I think).
Totally agree. I wonder, with a market of a billion users, does a set of software apps that are not back-compatible with our bloated legacy become plausible?
You could use old Windows or Unix apps. Or DOS apps. Or even old Apple ][ apps. Or, you could write an entirely new set of apps - a fresh start, in a fresh market, on fresh hardware. Doesn't that have a certain appeal?
Freed from back-compatibility with bloated software, does a $10 laptop become plausible?
Maybe something like the hp200lx: DOS, 24x80 LCD screen with incredible battery life (2 AA batteries), came with lotus 123 spreadsheet etc. Or, even lower specs than that.
In fact, I have an old Toshiba laptop with initially 256MB of RAM. It had both Windows XP and FreeBSD+KDE in dual boot. Windows XP takes forever to boot and runs like a snail. On the other hand FreeBSD was pretty usable.
But one day, some part of the RAM stopped to run stripping
it down to 68MB. Even FreeBSD+KDE wasn't usable anymore.
So I decided to use Enlightenment as a window manager instead. Installing only the strict necessary: xmms for listening to music, vlc for videos, emacs as a text editor and for coding, xpdf as a pdf viewer, feh as image viewer.
The performance is pretty correct. It doesn't have an internet connexion because I found out I'm more productive
without it when coding. So I use it more than I expected to
get things done.
I am not sure what you would call "normal software", but i have an old machine that is a PIII with a 550Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM(i use it as a file server). I run on it a version of xubuntu(forgot which version, but it is about a year or so old). XFCE runs beautifully on it. Along with all of its software. And with an even lower end machine, you can use even lighter desktop systems.
Of course, you'd need to substitute a few of your regular applications, for example firefox still has a few problems with memory, and so you might want to look at an alternative.
I guess a laptop like that (if it ever gets made) would probably run some lightweight Unix-like OS. And it would be more like an appliance, where you can only run the programs that come bundled with it.
So, no installing random Windows software in it.
I disagree with the OP about wireless: I think nowadays Wi-Fi and maybe even cellphone connectivity would be a must for such a device.
Launching any non-trivial application also took terribly long. Not just the Office, but even Firefox felt more like Photoshop. I couldn't believe how bloated the software had become.
These $100 machines you're talking about can't run normal software, you'll need Microsoft to start selling Win98 or you'd need a stripped-down Linux with XFCE or something. The key to performance IMO is smaller binary sizes: those CPUs had tiny caches and pathetic memory throughput. Pentiums ran on 33-66Mz FSB, compare it to 1066Mz of modern machines.