I spent some time recent;ly playing with and learning about the concept of public computing. Computers placed in public locations, primarily for accessing the Internet.

Public workstations appear in libraries, internet cafés, hotel lobbies, work camps, military bases. They are anywhere people want to or need to access the internet, but personal computers don’t fit, or aren’t available.

There is a Canadian company who has really nailed the whole concept, Userful Corporation, out of Calgary (www.userful.com) has a product called the Discover Station. It is a Linux based computer, that is designed from the ground up for public computing.

A single PC can run up to 10 workstations, which is both economical, and very environmentally friendly, with less power consumption and manufacturing waste than 10 individual PCs. In fact last year Discover Station saved us all over 13,500 tons of CO2 emissions over what would have been generated with stand alone PCs. That is the equivalent of taking 2300 cars off the road.