Nando Times

Brazil rethinks the budget computer

By TONY SMITH, Associated Press

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil (March 4, 2001 11:08 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Hard disk? Who needs it? Windows? Why bother? Floppy drive? Forget about it.

The small, transparent acrylic box sitting in Sergio Vale Campos' office at the Federal University of Minas Gerais has none of the above basics, but it is still a computer.

What's more important in Brazil, where the digital divide is a gaping abyss, the machine's lack of frills should mean it can be produced for about 600 reals, or $300. It is a PC for the people, a Volkscomputer.

Late last year the government commissioned Vale Campos' team to design the low-budget machine as a response to worries about worsening the country's social and economic inequalities by starving the poor of information technology.

The computer had to have a modem, a color monitor, speakers, a mouse and simple Internet-browsing software. It also had to be modular so users could later add a printer or disk drives.

By early February, a prototype was ready and later this year, once software hitches have been smoothed out, the government plans to install the stripped-down machines in public schools and sell them to low-wage earners on installment for as little as $15 a month.

Installation in public schools alone will give Internet access to 7 million children.

"We realized this was not a First World problem - we were not going to find a Swedish or a Swiss company to solve this for us. We would have to do it ourselves," said Ivan Moura Campos, the project's mastermind and no relation to Vale Campos.

In the United States, a cheap PC might go for $500, but that's expensive in Brazil, where the minimum monthly wage is 150 reals, or $75.

"If everything we are planning becomes reality, and we manage to produce this at 600 reals per unit, we will be creating a new base of some millions of new computer users in Brazil," he said.

Brazil, with its 170 million people and $580 billion gross domestic product, is Latin America's largest economy. Its 3.9 million regular Internauts, as Web surfers are called here, mean it also accounts for about 40 percent of Latin America's Internet users, according to a recent study by eMarketer.

Still, most Brazilians don't earn enough to have a phone line, never mind a computer.

When Vale Campos chose his components, everything had to be available on the Brazilian market to keep costs low. The result, he says, is a multimedia machine about half the size of a regular PC that "might be cheap, but is not trash."

He counts off the computer's attributes on his fingers: a 500-megahertz processor, 64 megabytes of main memory and 16 MB more on a flash chip that substitutes for a hard drive.

There's a 56 kbps modem and the software is Linux-based and, therefore, free. Because the machine is modular, schools can link a series up to a regular PC that would act as a server.

"What we did was imagine a PC and strip off the fat," said Vale Campos, who got his doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

The main difficulty was configuring hardware and software, he said, because "many pieces automatically assume there is a hard drive and here there is none."

Now all the government needs is somebody to build it.

Local industry executives have hinted they might not be able to build the Volkscomputer for $300. According to Moura Campos, their first response to the government was $600, about $400 cheaper than the current price of a budget PC.

But he says a producer will be found, thanks to tax incentives recently enshrined in a new information technology law. Others are not so sure.

"Equipment is getting cheaper by the day, but I'm not sure the market price for this minimal micro will really be 600 reals," said Carlos Afonso, development director at the Sao Paulo-based Network for the Third Sector.

"And in addition, it's not enough to have a computer - you have to have somewhere to connect it to," he said, referring to a nationwide shortage of telephone lines that, in any case, are normally too expensive for most low-income Brazilians.

Afonso is convinced the short-term solution must be "collective" public Internet access centers.

Last year, Brazil's postal service launched Porta Aberta, or Open Door, a project that gives the public free access to Internet kiosks, but only in selected post offices in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), March 04, 2001