VLSI came in with the 486s, and many of these motherboards run on less power than a 386, or even a 286. I've seen some with 4meg DRAM run on 12 watts. They also can be found with 'green' CMOS, which shuts down the video and HD, so you could have each terminal stand by on less than 20. Point of Sale monitors with 9" screens can get by on 20 to 60 depending on whether they are gray scale VGA or color SVGA... while working. DR-DOS 7 comes with NETWARE, which I've not tried. but the FILELINK.EXE that also comes with it runs on a RS 232 at about 100k/sec. DTR. And if what you need are number crunching for invoices, orders, inventory, etal, that's plenty, especially if you can set it up with ASEASY.EXE (as easy as 123 shareware), a text mode spreadsheet that processes data quickly not needing the overhead of a GUI. The menus are clunky, but not CLI, can be mouse driven with pulldowns and scrollbar clicking. There are several dos email tools out there, as you see below, I used ARACNE.EXE for this, which can be optimized for anything on down to a 286. since ARACHNE is a GUI web browser, I wouldnt try it on anything less than a 486, but with a 486, I have surfed without difficulty. Arachne also comes with network configurations. All of these would be fine for kids, who are usually so nearsighted small screens are no big deal. In the gray market, you could prolly set up 486 terminals for 200$/each. uncopywritten- do what you will with it. -- Arachne V1.68, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/ To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
