MIT Team Working On a $12 Apple (II) Desktop

Barence writes "A new project to create a $12 computer is underway at MIT, the same University that spawned the One Laptop Per Child non-profit laptop. The PCs will be loosely based on Apple 2 machines, first unveiled over 30 years ago, and the team are actively recruiting enthusiasts of the retro computer to help develop the new PC." Update: 08/05 14:13 GMT by T : The original story at the Boston Herald has more information, as well as a photo of the team.

Comments

Sweet

[Hatta]

Maybe I can finally play Ultima II on the Apple. Seriously, it doesn't work in any emulator I've tried. Kegs, AppleWin, Mess, nothing wants to recognize when I swap in a player disk.

Re:Sweet

[dubbreak]

The third is a 42" LG 1080p HDTV, connected via HDMI. On that, there's no problems at all.

Ah yes, so we just need to get each of the poor children a 1080P hdtv to go with their $12 pc.

Re:Sweet

[MBGMorden]

I gotta agree. I used both a Commodore 64 and a Tandy TRS-80 (can't remember the exact model variation of the Tandy) on television screens and they worked just fine for programming on a TV screen. Still have both of those actually. As a matter of fact a LONG time ago, before the C64, I had a little toy called a VTech Pre Computer 1000. It had a built in single line LCD display with a fully QWERTY keyboard. It supported BASIC and I programmed a lot of stuff on that too. You'd be surprised how much an interested kid can pickup from those old systems.

And as a hobby, I pickup older computers like that when I find them in swap shops/Goodwills/flea markets. I've since added 2 TI-99/4a's, another C64, a C128, a ZX Spectrum, and an Apple IIgs to my collection. The most I paid for any of them was $5 (and the ZX Spectrum was actually given to me - a guy I know in WoW heard about my collection and had it in his attic so he offered to mail it over).

Re:Sweet

[dosius]

With a Ramworks, the Apple //e could handle 3 MB of RAM. In theory it could handle 16 MB, but the documentation said it was limited to 48 banks.

-uso.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just the 70's, but the 80's. This integrated keyboard and plug into TV model was used by Commodores, TI/99a, Sinclairs, Ataris, even IBM's PC Jr. It may not look nice, but it is functional. I started programming on the Vic20 and C64 using the TV with the old cassette drive.

I would disagree that it won't help at all, but it is a severe disadvantage. I learned on that hardware, and used the TV as display for years. It has massive limitations with screen resolution, similar or worse than most basic cell phones. (The old 12x24 text mode. Yes, we did development like that.)

Screen scrolling techniques like the iphone uses would be required to do modern browsing or document editing.

Sounds like an interesting idea, but filled with challenges. It would be easier to just include an LCD and make it a cheap, rugged laptop.

Re:Sweet

[ncc74656]

Yup! I still have an Apple //e with a Rocket chip + 384kb ram and 20 MB hard drive (Conner) running Prodos and Mousedesk.

The RocketChip kicked ass...wish I hadn't sold mine when I upgraded my IIe to a IIGS, as I ended up snagging another IIe at a garage sale a few years later. The IIGS (in a IIe case, upgraded with a kit back in '92 or '93) is currently set up with 4.25 MB RAM, an 8-MHz ZipGS, and an Apple DMA SCSI card with a 4.3-GB Seagate Barracuda (it was cheap when I bought it, and the previous drive was getting flaky) and a 4x CD-ROM drive hanging off of it. It's connected to the LAN through a GatorBox CS, through which it can share files and get a limited amount of Internet access. I converted a microATX-type power supply (one of the really small ones you see in eMachines boxes) to power it; it easily runs fanless at the low load that's placed on it, but if I were to replace the stock power supply today, I'd combine a LittlePower with a picoPSU.

How long until Apple sues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't they learned from Psystar or Psyduck or whatever they're called.

loosely based on the Apple ][?

[reiisi]

Not many details.

6502? Hang a keyboard on a gameboy?

Flash instead of cassette tape, to be sure.

Sixteen bit addresses?

6809 would give it enough horsepower to actually run an early version of unix, but then you couldn't get the low-low power out of programmable logic that you can out of hard-wired 6502 cores. And you'd still have that problem of virtual addressing facing any kid with enough ambition to try to (re)program it.

Freescales m-core might be interesting as a CPU, but then they would potentially collide with the goals of OLPC.

I'm rambling, but this touches a kind of long-term fantasy of mine -- basically, put the equivalent of a Radio Shack Color Computer (but with something better than MSBASIC) in every kid's pocket.

Why not base it on the C64DTV chip instead?

[Lester67]

It's already in production, and is a fully functioning C64 on a chip.

Just sayin' (and prolly igniting another Apple/Commodore war. :-)

Re:Not much details...

[RiotingPacifist]

Doesnt binary compatibility depend on the OS, which id guess to be BSD/linux.

Based on appel II is much more likely to mean in terms of architecture & hardware

Re:Clustering C64 drives

[querist]

The 1541 floppy drive (the floppy drive used with the C64) had its own processor and memory. A popular (and fun) "trick" was to write code that would load into the 1541's memory and run on its processor, and have it talk to the C64. Essentially, a two-processor "cluster" back in the 1980's.

The C64 was a wonderful "playground" for experimentation.

You ain't seen nothing yet

[Anonymous Coward]

To say that the C64 had a "basic pixel framebuffer" is a big understatement.

Soiled Legacy

That is a 1MHz 8-bit processor pushing the VIC (video) and SID (sound) to their limits.

Re:How to solve world hunger:

[uglydog]

Actually, if you could get children to forgo sex in many of these third world countries, a large number of their biggest issues would be solved.

It is a popular misconception that population size causes poverty. Here are a couple of sources: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7DA133CF936A25757C0A965958260 http://www.cwpe.org/node/126

Re:But...but...but...

[dosius]

The original ][ had Steve Wozniak's BASIC which was limited but very well coded. It had a minor bug that produced the wrong error message in certain circumstances, not bad for being HAND-ASSEMBLED.

Then they ditched it for that pile known as Applesoft, the mutant brother of the Commodore BASIC, which like the Commodore BASIC was written at M$. It was a more powerful BASIC, sure, but it was considered bloated (10K vs. 6K) and sluggish, and it had a number of bugs. Sound familiar?

-uso.

Re:Clustering C64 drives

[Orion Blastar]

I had an Amiga, but I remember the PC's had a shell to DOS option in QModem and Procom to run those DOS based GIF reader programs. It was not true multitasking like the Amiga had, but it worked.

The Amiga lost due to marketing, it was better than a Macintosh at half the Macintosh price, plus full color which a Mac couldn't do until the Macintosh II series came out. By that time the PC had VGA as well. Amigas never really tried to innovate beyond what PCs and Macs could do, but did have the microkernel advantage of a true preemptive Unix-like OS that boot off a floppy and still had a GUI. By the time PCs and Macs caught up to Amigas, their OSes had to boot from a hard drive to do what the Amiga did from a floppy boot, and were bloated to boot unlike the Amiga.

Re:neat idea

[story645]

isn't used or some orphaned clearance model.

So what's wrong with that? Techies who buy this thing for curiosity will have their own, and I doubt underprivileged kids are gonna be that picky.
Build it into the advertising campaign: "keyboards for kids: your old keyboard can make a difference" and try to partner with a big hardware manufacture like Dell or HP and see if they've got a crate of old ones somewhere.