Global PC-What's Under the Hood?

starflyer45 asks: "Does anybody know anything about the inner workings of this thing? the Global PC. What's the processor, the harddisk space? What's the OS for that matter? It's supposed to be a dumbed-up version of a computer that "anyone can use", but being one of the "not anyones" I want to know the nitty-gritty details with all the 'hertz' and 'bytes' intact."

dumbed-up?

[xercist]

Don't you mean dumbed-down? ;)

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GlobalPC's commercial

[blameless]

After seeing their commercial [adcritic.com], I assumed GlobalPC was selling refurbished Macs.

Worse than riding in a rusted Yugo...

[human bean]

I don't know about the rest of the world, but where I'm located a good used Pentium with modem, screen, and eight meg is about a hundred bucks. Pay another hundred to some middle-school techno-geek to have them lock everything down except the browser and Quicken. Set the modem to auto-dial and have the techling set up your internet account. Save one hundred bucks, and you can run Doom on it later after you get to the right side of your learning curve (although sloooowly...)

QNX? Um, no.

[dbirchall]

The Global PC runs GEOS.

Those of us who're old enough may remember GEOS on the C-64, C-128 and Apple II from Berkeley Softworks, back in the '80s. BSW became GeoWorks [geoworks.com] around 1990, and sold the OS and app suites based on it for a few years, as well as selling it for PDA's like the Tandy/Casio/Sharp "Zoomer" and some HP OmniGo models.

Around the mid-'90s, GeoWorks focused more on smart phones (the Nokia 9000 [nokia.com] family of smart phones run GEOS), and desktop stuff was taken over by New Deal, Inc. [newdealinc.com].

On the x86 platform, GEOS offered pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, and object-oriented design (coded in something resembling Objective C, if I recall from the days when I had the SDK and developer docs, and in assembler) - and it did this a full five years ahead of Windows 95. In 1990, it had shared UI code for all apps, like GNOME and KDE are now doing.

It was also very fast as a platform - it was originally designed to run on an 8086 with 640K, and even the most recent versions are quite happy on a '286 with a meg or two. On anything "recent" in the way of a CPU, it should outperform just about anything - unless, of course, it's loading stuff over a dialup...

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it aint no I-opener

[goatse.cx guy]

Here's some of the details:
This 200 MHz beast is made by MyTurn and features the last of the WinChip 2's on the market. Like the Netpliance's device, it features 32 MB ram with a 16 MB flash chip. Applications and images, however are saved on a remote server located at the ISP. It runs the QNX operating system, but I couldn't drop into a shell in order to see if they fixed the passwd encryption yet.

Although the software looks impressive from the website, it is VERY slow. It seems to download the pages for the applications. I'm not sure if this is true, but you have to be online to run all of the organization software and every time that the page has to refresh, it takes about 30 seconds for it to refresh. This was the main complaint that my Aunt had.

If it's hackable, then I'm sure that Codeman [linux-hacker.net] will be able to do it. I won't get one because the flat screen I-opener is all that I need.