Richard A. Johnson

Last night as I went to bed, I turned on the television to see what was on. This is typically the way I fall asleep. I came across this movie titled, “The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest” from 2002. In this movie, 4 researches split off from some big research company to create a $99 PC. Where have I heard that one before? Oh, they were only off by a $1. Then, in order to make this $99 PC, they had to get rid of so much, they got rid of things such as:

• Hard drives
• CDROM drives
• Floppy drives
• and more…

This got them to thinking, if we get rid of all of this, then how in the hell will this PC work? Their answer, put the software on the Internet! Here are a couple of quotes from the movie:

• “The world needs a cheap portable computer, Casper. Third world school children want to join the information age.”
• “Your mother uses Macintosh!”

The movie was quite hokey, and what they created was a small computer that looked like a toy of some kind from the Star Trek set. It used a hologram instead of a monitor, and it had icons that roughly represent the icons that Google uses today, except when you clicked on email for instance, the little envelope sprouted wings and flew up to be read. So in 2002, a movie starts talking about our so-called cloud computing buzz word, a $99 PC, and makes fun of the Mac kids. We are just a bit late to the game now, time to innovate something else