Pedal-powered e-mail in the jungle 2 Bay Area visionaries head to Laos with a tough little PC for villagers
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, January 17, 2003 Early next month, a villager in the mountainous jungles of northern Laos will climb onto a stationary bicycle hooked to a handmade, wireless computer and pedal his people into the digital age. It will be the first time a human-powered computer has ever linked a Third World village to the Internet by wireless remote. And the two Americans who will make this possible -- one a Navy veteran who became a leader in the Vietnam anti-war movement two generations ago, the other a founding pioneer of Silicon Valley -- plan to be at his side as he pedals. Long ago, when their hair was jet-black and the '60s were hot, these two graying Boomers -- Lee Thorn of San Francisco and Lee Felsenstein of Palo Alto [an old friend of Lou's, I believe] -- were in the forefront of the raucous Berkeley left. Today, they still want to change the world. But this time, it will be in the middle of a jungle 7,500 miles from home in a tiny village called Phon Kham -- with a computer they specially created to help some of the neediest people on earth. So why are they doing this? "It will be like Alexander Graham Bell, in the jungle," Thorn said. "It's groundbreaking and new. "Right now, the villagers have no way of telling what the market is like in the big towns they sell their stuff to, telling what the weather report is for their crops, things like that. This will absolutely change that. Plus, they will be able to talk to relatives in America some of them haven't seen in decades." LOW-MAINTENANCE MACHINE Technological projects have been slowly hooking remote villages in places such as India and Africa to the computer age for several years. But not in this way. They either involve cell phones, which need high-tech transmitter towers, or computers hooked into electricity and cable phone lines -- not foot pedals and wireless antennas nailed to trees. This new computer also has another element not common to Third World tech projects: The input of villagers who wouldn't normally know a megabyte from a mosquito bite, but who are helping install it and who will be trained by Thorn's group. Word has already spread so far and wide that 40 countries, including South Africa and Peru, are interested in it. "This will change everyone's lives in Phon Kham," Vorasone Denkayaphichitch, who is coordinating the project in Laos and has relatives in the village area, said from Vientiane, the capital of Laos. "The important thing is for them to have communication, because every day they sell their ducks, rice, weaving and chickens, and every day they have to sell for less money than they should because they can't know what the real price is down in the towns." PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS All 200 residents of Phon Kham live in bamboo houses with thatch roofs. There is no electricity. No telephone. If you want to go to the next tiny village a few miles away, you walk a dirt road that will probably wash out when the monsoons come. It's about what you'd expect in the 10th-poorest nation on earth -- which during the Vietnam War had 2 million tons of bombs dropped on it by the United States, more than was dumped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. On its face, it could sound crazy to try to hook Laos up to a microchip world that its villagers would seem incapable of understanding, let alone using. But nobody had counted on the 59-year-old Thorn. During the Vietnam War, he was a Navy bomb loader on an aircraft carrier that was among those that launched devastating air strikes against Laos and Cambodia in the then-secret U.S. "shadow war." Decades later, racked with a need for penance, Thorn created the Jhai Foundation, a nonprofit that works to rebuild rural Laos -- and which will launch this new computer. His partner in the computer venture has an equally dynamic background, albeit more pacific. Felsenstein, 57, invented the Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer, and in the 1970s he kick-started the home computer revolution with his fellow nerds in the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple creators Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. PEDAL POWER His latest invention, created specially for Thorn's group, is the bike- pedaled computer. The two have assembled a team of a dozen wireless-technology and personal computer hotshots from the Bay Area and around the world, and they will tromp into the land mine-, snake-infested Laotian jungles over the next few weeks. There, with the help of the Phon Kham villagers, they will install the computer Felsenstein created out of off-the-shelf odds and bits -- and on Feb. 12, they intend to fire the machine up and hook into the Internet. SOLUTION FOR VILLAGERS They call the invention the Jhai Computer, Jhai meaning "hearts and minds working together" in Laotian. It was built because the villagers asked Thorn for a way, any way, they could better tap into their country's economy and have contact with the outside world. The bike-pedaled generator will power a battery that in turn runs the computer, which sits in an 8-by-10-inch box and has the power of a pre-Pentium, 486-type computer. Felsenstein designed it to run on only 12 watts -- compared to a typical computer's 90 watts -- so the bike power would be up to the task. "It has no moving parts, the lid seals up tight, and you can dunk it in water and it will still run," Felsenstein said. "The idea is to be rugged, last at least 10 years and run in both the monsoon season and the dry season." ROOF-TO-TREE CONNECTIVITY The computer will hook up with a wireless card -- an 802.11b, the current industry standard -- to an antenna bolted on the roof of a bamboo house, and the signal will be beamed from there to an antenna nailed to a tree on top of a mountain. There the signal will be bounced to Phon Hong, which sits 25 miles from Phon Kham and is the nearest big village with phone lines. The phone lines then hook to an Internet service provider. Felsenstein crafted the Jhai to run on Linux software, a system which, unlike some other software, will not be obsolete in 18 months. Then he recruited a Laotian IBM engineer in New York to customize it to the Lao language. Mark Summer, a leader among San Francisco wireless aficionados, designed the connections and tested them last summer on the city's hills. Through the Internet connection, the Jhai Computer will be able to not only do e-mail, but also run a two-way telephone system through Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP. If the first Jhai Computer works as planned, Thorn's group will hook up four nearby villages and start an institute to train the residents. Eventually, they may mass-produce it for other countries. "I've never heard of anything exactly like this being done, in this way," said Dennis Allison, the noted Stanford University electrical engineering lecturer and co-founder of the groundbreaking People's Computer Co. in the 1970s. After seeing a recent presentation by Felsenstein on the invention, he concluded: "From a social impact point of view, it's a big deal. A very big deal." HEALING MISSION What impelled Thorn to recruit Felsenstein and the rest of his team is the same thing that motivated him to create the Jhai Foundation in 1998. He wants to repair the damage wreaked by a war nobody acknowledged at the time -- officially, the United States never laid a hand, let alone a bomb, on Laos -- and in doing so repair some of the pain he feels at having been part of that war. "This is all about Jhai, the hearts and minds together, about doing what is right," Thorn said. "This is what the Phon Kham people asked for, and this is the most reasonable response to their request. It's simple." It's the same straightforward style he used three decades ago when he co- founded the national Veterans for Peace at UC Berkeley. And five years ago as well, when he loaded up a backpack of surplus medical supplies and flew to Laos with the simple aim of doing some good, and wound up creating his foundation. "I go back again and again out of gratitude," Thorn said. "The last five years I've been able to heal myself in ways I never thought would be possible, and that's because of the relationships I've built in Laos." Operating on a shoestring budget of donations from contacts Thorn made as a peace activist, Jhai has built wells, installed computer learning labs for children, helped clear unexploded bombs and started importing coffee to America. The most powerful factor on Thorn's side these days is the genius he knew from the old radical times and whom he recruited to get the computer project going -- Felsenstein. For Felsenstein, the idea of making a computer "for the people" has driven him since the 1960s, when he wrote for the Berkeley Barb and was tech whiz for the Free Speech Movement. The zeal never faded as Felsenstein's career carried on through the years to his current job at a Mountain View medical instruments company. "The human situation fit very well to what could be done with the technology we had available," he said in his characteristic dead-pan, engineer's earnestness. "What's incredible is that we couldn't just go to the store and buy this already, that it had to be invented." Neither of the two Lees, both not as svelte as they used to be, is looking forward to schlepping the computer and its clunky antennas through the jungle. But neither is complaining. People scoffed at Thorn years ago when he wanted to band veterans together to make a peace movement, and they scoffed at Felsenstein when he said he could make a portable computer. And today, they are just as determined to beat the odds. Some whom they have consulted for advice on where to buy batteries and the like have, just at the mention of the project, laughed skeptically. That just makes the two Lees smile. "When someone says to me, 'I don't understand what you're doing, you must be crazy,' I know I'm on the right track," Felsenstein said. For information on donations to the Jhai Foundation's work in Laos, go to www.jhai.org/donations.htm. / E-mail Kevin Fagan at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
