When the government minister for technology in Macedonia, one of Europe’s poorest countries, decided to jolt the nation’s educational system by outfitting schools with new computers, he had a surprising array of blue-chip choices.
After all, between a soon-to-be-released laptop dreamed up by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors, the “Classmate PC” from Intel Corp. and other inexpensive options, low-cost computing for international schoolchildren is now one of technology’s hottest concepts.
Yet when Macedonia sealed its 44 million euro ($61 million) computing venture, the government went with a tech provider whose own CEO acknowledges “nobody’s heard of us.”
That vendor is a Silicon Valley startup called NComputing Inc., and the reasons it won the Macedonian contract and deals in several U.S. schools could make the company a force in education and other big computer markets.
NComputing’s technology lets organizations take one PC and parcel its computing power out to “thin clients” used by multiple people. The concept is old, but the march of progress in computing could be making it feasible on a wider scale. Even today’s lower-rung PCs are loaded with processing power and memory that largely sit unused except in extreme kinds of programs.
NComputing users plug a keyboard, mouse and monitor into a little box that maintains a connection to one hub PC or server. Wires are necessary for now, but soon wireless links will be possible.
Software in the NComputing boxes gives each of the users an individual computing session with different desktop appearances and different programs even though all of them are sharing the central processor and hard drive in the hub PC.
