Computers? Oh yes, I remember those...

Since we moved house, probably about 1½ months ago, none of our ordinary computers have been set up. In part this is because the would-be-study was crammed full of boxes (no, real boxes, I'm not talking about computers here!) and there was no room for a desk. Another reason is that once Mrs. Ball found the DSL modem, I set up a 300 MHz Apple iBook in the kitchen, configured mostly for use as an Internet terminal of sorts. It has Firefox, gAIM and irssi, all running on top of Terra Soft Yellow Dog Linux. There's no email software because we both have Web mail accounts and AT&T showed no interest in making our AT&T email account work. Okay, it can't play video or the vast majority of audio files. It's not up to videoconferencing. It has been robust enough to put up with daily use though and provides a big chunk of the functionality we "need" every day. When we're done with it we simply close the lid and it goes to sleep. Open it up and within a few seconds we're right back where we were. Although it wasn't conceived as an experiment, I think we've proven that we could survive with just an Internet terminal. We'll still use desktop PCs for digital photography, office applications, gaming and hopefully digital video work, but I think it's handy to have a machine sitting around that lets us jump on the Web without having to wait for an operating system to boot, or without being confined to the study. I expect a 600 MHz G3 iBook (the shiny white ones) with an Airport card would probably do the job.