New Internet Computer

» see thinknic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

a 199 dollar computer with no hard disk was never going to be something you walked into a shop in ankara and bought in 2000. the new internet computer was sold in the united states, aimed at american households that had not yet bought a pc, and priced against an american idea of what cheap meant. in turkey that year the actual answer to "i cannot afford a computer" was the internet cafe on the corner, and the cafe had real machines because it had to run counter-strike.

the nic shipped on 6 july 2000. inside was a 266 mhz cyrix mii, 64 megabytes of ram, four megabytes of flash and no drive of any kind. it booted linux from a cd-rom, which meant the operating system could not be broken by the user and could not be updated by them either. wim coekaerts built the distribution. there was ethernet, a 56k modem, two usb ports and a netzero account in the box. no monitor, that was your problem.

larry ellison funded it personally and gina smith ran it as chief executive from 2000 to 2003. the pitch was the same one ellison had been making since 1995 with oracle's network computer, that the pc was a badly designed appliance and the network should hold the complexity instead. this time it was cheaper, it ran linux, and it did not need oracle's permission. it still did not work.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the target was five million units in the first year. real sales came in under fifty thousand, which is the kind of miss that tells you the problem was not marketing. the people who could not afford a pc mostly could not afford the monitor either, and the people who could afford both did not want a machine that stopped at the browser. windows 98 was ugly and it crashed, but it also ran the games and every printer that came with a driver cd, and that turned out to be the entire product.

by 2002 the price of an ordinary tower with a hard disk in it had fallen far enough that the nic's one advantage was gone. the company closed in june 2003. pc world later put it ninth on a list of the worst pcs ever made, which is harsher than it deserves. it did exactly what it said. what it said was just not what anyone wanted.

~ the funny part ~

ellison was not wrong, he was early by about a decade and pointed at the wrong customer. the machine that finally worked was the chromebook, which has no meaningful local storage and an operating system the user cannot break. google shipped it to schools rather than to poor households, which is the piece ellison missed, and by the mid-2010s it was outselling macs in american classrooms.

thinknic.com serves an error page in 2026. one of the units sits in the computer history museum's collection, which is the correct resting place for an object that was mostly an argument.

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