Technology Requirements For Children: RAM and Storage Space?

As the long winded debate on the $100 laptop continues on the Digital Divide email list (and you know what I think), it occurred to me to check something.

The text size of Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' (infamous for it's size) takes up 3.13 megabytes as uncompressed text. How many large books like that will a schoolchild need? I feel a bit like Richard Feynman with a shuttle O ring in a glass of water here, but...

If the text is compressed - with the ZIP technique - it gets down to 1.16 megabytes.

1 Gigabyte on a USB stick - 640 copies of Zipped 'War and Peace' can fit on it. 310 copies unzipped. Let's work with unzipped for a more conservative figure which requires less processing power.

256 megabytes gives us 77.5 copies of 'War and Peace'.
128 megabytes gives us 38.75 copies of 'War and Peace'.
64 megabytes gives us 19.375 copies of 'War and Peace'.
32 megabytes gives us 9.6875 copies of 'War and Peace'
16 megabytes gives us 4.84375 copies of 'War and Peace'.

Back to file size - of course, this is based on actual text files instead of bloated word processing files. So I decided to check saving it in two other formats using OpenOffice.org 2.0:

OpenOffice format is 1.32 megabytes.
Microsoft Office 2000 format is 7.59 megabytes (really, download the txt file and save it with Microsoft Word and see for yourself...)
And, converting to Adobe Acrobat gets us 2.85 megabytes.
HTML format: 3.21 megabytes.

Will the real Slim Tolstoy please stand up?

It seems that OpenOffice format somehow took a 3.13 megabyte text file and made it almost a third of the size, Microsoft Office 2000 format made it a little over twice the size, and PDF conversion came up with about a 30% saving on size. HTML format shows a slight increase, with the ability to be viewed in a browser (as a text file can be, too).

Umm. So, how much memory does a child need for a year using which software?

But OpenOffice.org - the clear winner here - doesn't play well with less than 128 megabytes of RAM - we were talking about storage space above. But... a standard text viewer can operate in at most kilobytes of RAM.

I think this is a good start with some real data. Will the real Slim Tolstoy please stand up?

Processing power need decreases with the less complex the software, and let's face it - the most advanced thing a secondary school student will probably face is calculus. And they use... calculators for that, when they are permitted (I wasn't, but times change).

Nowadays we could probably stick all of this on a cell phone and use a cell phone mesh network, which would be really cool, but again we'll bump into the same problems: Infrastructure and telecommunications policy.

Now, if someone has all the textbooks for a year a schoolchild will need - Raw Text - let's take a look at it, crunch the number, and actually build some requirements. But can someone get a publisher to agree to that? Of course not, we're looking at changing their lucrative business model. But we could average words per page of each book and how many pages there are, and go from there. Then there are the images as well - and we could compare GIF, JPEG and PNG (I have a good idea which will win in most cases). And the use of images takes us to the minimum of HTML level for the text itself.

Right now, I think 64 Meg of storage space should be sufficient, if only the texts were available in an electronic format. And that is the point that quite a few people have been making throughout the $100 laptop debate, as well as the debate on any technology... where's the material?

And why are we building machines when we don't even have the material? We don't even have an estimate of the size of the files we expect children to work with?

Uh oh. Seems like we need more data. We probably need more Open Content for students, too.

The original image at top of a Simputer editing the Wikipedia entry on the Simputer, by me, can be viewed here.