The Travelling Modem Man (TMM) is the Internet version of the postman. Every day he would go around on his "walk" visiting each home that had a workstation. Using his cordless extension and modem he would connect the workstation to the Internet for sufficient time to enable  the Off-Line Reader software to go through its cycle - about two minutes. During this time he would:

Download news and mail

Uploads individual citizens mail and messages

A TMM's walk would always be within the transmission range of the cordless extension to the fixed cellphone. This would be likely to be around 500 metres as standard although in underdeveloped areas this could be increased by boosting the transmission power of the cordless transmitter in the fixed cellphone base station to produce a range of several miles.

So what about the workstation ? What kinds of system could go into every home? Well here is an outline specification based around a refurbished 386 based system and a refurbished dot matrix printer. It would have as its underlying operating system PC-DOS or DR-DOS. And it would contain a number of clones of obsolete packages (to get around any copyright problems). A basic system might contain:

Word Processing - WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (or an equivalent product)

Spreadsheet- Lotus 123 (or an equivalent product)

Database - DBase III (or an equivalent product)

E-mail

Electronic Conferencing

Games

Total Cost (including printer)

Ringit 250 ( about £40)

Such a system would not be a graphical Windows like system. But it would be completely workable, stable, reliable and easy to operate. By reengineering the units from redundant components using a standard fixed software image Year 2000 problems could be designed out of the workstation.

An upgrade path to a graphical Windows-like systems is possible with the new workstation based on Linux. This for performance reasons would have to be based around a minimum of a 486 processor. The upgrade  would be totally upward and downward compatible but more expensive than the 386 based minimum system.

The minimum system would not be able to surf the Internet. That requires more bandwidth and more processor power. But with the minimum system the ordinary user could do a lot. Here are the Initial Benefits