3G Computer Specification

I was looking at old articles and one of them caught my eye: The specification for a 3M computer. If you want to know about 3M computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer

Basically, it has a Megahertz of CPU speed, a Megabyte of memory, and a Megapixel display. Preferably under a Megacent of price ($10,000). Somewhere down there in the Reference section, there is a funny story about how Steve Jobs tried to sell a consortium to Brown University, and the interesting thing about the story is that the 3rd M is MegaFlop.

A Flop is basically a Floating Point of Instruction. A Megaflop is basically a million of them in one second. The old Macintosh doesn't have a math co-processor, hence, no FLOP, just plain old CPU painstakingly doing the old computation the hard way.

Of course, that was before. Nowadays, I don't want a 3M computer. I want a 3G computer. What's 3G computer?

A Gigahertz CPU, a Gigabytes RAM, a Gigabit Bandwidth. 

Notice that I don't really care about screen resolution nor do I care about Flops. As far as price is concerned, it should be under $100, but if it comes in a set, it should be at $300 max.

If you know me, then you know that I carry Raspberry Pi Zero as USB Dongle to be connected to my Chromebook. Actually, it also connects to my Smartphone, via VNC, as well as to my Raspberry Pi 4, which is my "fancy" computer at home for video editing and 3D graphics.

Is Raspberry Pi Zero (Raspi Zero) a 3G computer? No. Its specifications are 700 Mhz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 480 bps (USB2) Bandwidth. The original Raspi Zero was clocked at 1 GHz, but when it comes to RaspiZeroW got down-clocked to 700 Mhz, 800 Mhz overclock. Using it via VNC robs down its capability further. RAM and Bandwidth is only half of what I wanted. So suffice to say that a Raspi Zero isn't a 3G computer, but it's actually about 1/2 of a 3G computer. To point out the things in its favor: $10 for RaspiZeroW! Cheap.

Is there a solid 3G computer? Yes. Enter Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspi 4). It has 4 cores fo 1.6 Ghz, 4 GB of RAM, and USB 3 Bandwidth. Basically, it not only fulfills 3G computer specification, it went over in all dimension by 4 fold. Price? I got mine for $55. complete kit is only $300 including monitor and memory cards. That's a good deal.

And yet, for my daily drive computing, I still use Raspi Zero. Why? Why should I use some underpowered computer? Well, I just don't need that much of computing power. Sure, I need it for 3D graphic, for which there is never enough CPU speed, but for everything else, it's enough. Mostly. 

Lately, I've been running into issues where the program needs 3GB or RAM, where even if I'm willing to wait for the program to finish, I can't because there's not enough Memory available. Raspi 4 has enough memory, so I've been running such resource hungry programs there. 

But more often than not, I'd pull the old Linux CLI, and write my own scripts from scratch, and enjoy not only a fast, lightweight program for me to use, but one that is custom-made for my workflow, as well as bug free. Why wouldn't it be? After all, if there's a bug, I'd just fix it, since the source code is *right there*!