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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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Each one comes with a free leisure suit.
Proverbs 21:19
1) Give children in third world countries old computers
2) Get children addicted to Oregon Trail
3) Watch children forego sex, and therefore reproduction, in favor of Number Munchers
4) Profit!
It's bullet-proof!
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Where do I send my £12?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
All TFA says that it is loosly based on the Apple II. So what does that mean? Have the same CPU? Same OS? Same amount of RAM? Looks like the Apple II?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
can we just mark down a pile of old engineering calculators and call it a day? I remember watching some smarty-pants play Mario on his calculator during enviromental engineering classes lo these many years ago.
or cell phones, for gods' sake, my cell phone has a 314MHz processor in it, I played duke nukem 3D and watched streaming video on PCs that were slower, this cannot be that difficult.
figure it out, people and stop cluttering up /. with these endless utopian woolgathering snipehunts; please, and thank you.
Dunno, but Linux can run the Apple ][
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openapple/
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
4Mhz and 64k RAM? Don't be silly, you could get a 40 Mhz and 512k RAM along with some eeprom for less than $2 in a micro controller.
I am not sure how they are going to get the Monitor and keyboard so cheaply though....
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.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If we follow the pattern to its natural conclusion, we'll have $6.00 Altair 8800's, then $3.00 PDP-8's, then $1.50 UNIVAC's, then 75 cent ENIACS, then 3 Babbage Difference Engines for a nickel, and finally a Jacquard loom that you couldn't give away.
I agree.
My kid is into his second year of ICT at his secondary school (like High school for you American types), and I found to my horror that neither he, nor any of his friends who take that class even know what a sub folder is. Text files? A mystery, CLI? No idea...
What they do know is how to use Word, Powerpoint and (at a push) Excel. I hear they now use Dreamweaver instead of Frontpage. I see this as barely an improvement.
I think kids should spend a little time using computers that are as functional as the ones we used as kids (I'm from the Apple ][ Era myself), just so they can understand that a computer != a windows machine, and that there's more to it then the desktop and shortcuts. With the right teaching plan it would probably be a lot of fun.
I'm not proposing we throw out the modern PC, just that is be part of the process of learning about the computing subject, not the main focus.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It's already in production, and is a fully functioning C64 on a chip.
Just sayin' (and prolly igniting another Apple/Commodore war. :-)
from the article: "Hoping to make slashdot headlines and undercut all the other low cost computers coming from MIT... this new team hopes to produce a laptop that will be free." John Smith the leader of the team is quoted having said "Ideally we'd really like to make a computer that we pay you to take... but we've yet to work out the economics, so for now we're going to stick with the free computer." The team hopes to have their computer ready to go in a few years...
[members of] the team are actively recruiting...
the team is actively recruiting....
No, not in British English. Substitute "the team" with "they", and it makes sense.
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.
That's because by the time this comes out, $12 worth of Chinese components will cost $75.
Uh, More than one?
Zing!
Would it really be that much cheaper to make 1980s-vintage computers? I mean, once the design work is done, are the price differences between fabbing a 6502-type CPU and an ARM or x86 that great? I thought that the price advantage of using mass-market components would outweigh any savings made by using primitive technologies.
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.
Yep I remeber that was one of the things I hated about PCs. :)
On my little C64 with two drives I could start it formatting a disk and the go do something else. Or I could format two disks at once.
On the very expensive PCs you had to wait for the drive to format the floppy!
Man they sucked.
Then when I got my Amiga I was helping a local BBS test Zmodem. I downloaded a GIF and then the sysop asked me if it downloaded. I told him yes and to wait just a sec while I checked. He jumped right back and told me that I didn't have to log off and check it right now. I could wait until I was done on the BBS:) He was so confused when I told him that I didn't have to log off to check a GIF
Man how did PCs ever win....
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Each one comes preloaded with "Little Brick Out" and "Lemonade Stand".
Towards the Singularity.
From the article: "Rather than a laptop, the unit will act as a desktop computer and plug directly into a standard television."
This will be great until they sell out and try to put Windows XP on it.
Just use cellphones and have a way to use a real keyboard and screen at home so it doesn't suck to type or see anything for extended periods. Developing nations are leapfrogging the wired data infrastructure in favor of going straight to wireless, so there's your web connectivity already. Concentrate on making applications that work off of low end, low powered cellphones and can immediately see and make use of the difference between the built in keyboard and tiny screen and then the normal sized screen and keyboard. That exists now, just make it better and cheaper.
"...plug directly into a standard television."
*What* 'standard'?
NTSC? PAL? SECAM? PAL-M? SECAM-M? MESCAM? The 20-something variations thereof? Or one of the new digital/HD/etc. 'standards'?
Finally... a modding score for bad jokes....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Because that might be close it...in TFA they even mention "consoles with a keyboard" that are apparently popular in India as their starting point (adding to them network functionality).
BTW, the TFA is wrong about one detail - those consoles aren't based on Apple II, they're NES clones (still...the same CPU as in Apple II)
So I guess if you want to see what their machine will be capable of, check Contiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki ) on C-64 with ethernet adapter.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Which Apple ][ BASIC are you talking about? I extensively used both Wozniak's Integer BASIC (original ][) and the AppleSoft BASIC supplied on cassette and later incorporated in the AppleSoft ROM board and the Apple ][+, //e, and //c. While there were a small number of bugs in AppleSoft (produced under license from MicroSoft), I don't remember any bugs with Integer BASIC or the Sweet16 virtual machine interpreter included in the original ROMs.
For full disclosure: I am a published author of Apple ][ series software (Nibble magazine).
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Because there's an enormous pool of software for the Apple II - a pool of free software, not just commercial software, and free educational software to boot. And it's designed to work well with a standard TV set as the display.
The capabilities of the hardware are a minor issue. None of the alternatives you list are all that much better, and none of them have the huge pool of free and abandoned software. Computers aren't about hardware excellence, or we'd be using Amiga-derived computers now instead of IBM-PC clones. Computers aren't about processors, or the x86 would have died a well deserved death in the '80s. Computers are about running software. You get a computer that runs the software you want to run, and for an educational platform that has to hook up to a TV, the Apple II is probably the best choice.
I would hope that they used the 65C816 instead of the 6502. It's not a great CPU, but it would let them emulate anything up to the Apple IIGS, which gives them more software to choose from.
Because it's all about the software.
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.
open source modern art: laser taggi
They probably are not planning to build the computer exactly the same way it was done in the 1980's. They are probably planning to copy just a few stylistic items.
For instance, a modern micro-controller CPU would integrate almost the entire Apple II motherboard onto one chip, including the RAM, ROM, and peripherals. You can use the cheap hack (like the Apple II did) to generate composite video signals from just a few TTL output pins. If you pick the right microcontroller, DMA can be used to automatically output the video bitstream, and a built in counter timer can be used to generate the video clock. Additionally, most microcontrollers have I/O pins designed for keyboard scanning built into them. The result is one chip and a few miscellaneous components accomplishes everything on the motherboard of the original Apple II.
Unfortunately, you will still need a case, power supply, and keyboard. The keyboard could be the most expensive part of the design.
The rough approach of creating a bootable computer from a microcontroller is in widespread use. When I start a new micro-controller design, I frequently program a small boot monitor into the early versions of the CPU. This allows me to download new programs and manually test the on-board peripherals. Communication is done via RS-232 to a local PC. Occasionally, the same approach is used in Windows and Linux when doing kernel debugging from a remote PC. There is nothing to stop someone from programming a microcontroller in a higher level language like BASIC. Parallax has built a product around it, namely the BASIC Stamp. In practice, if you already have an in-circuit programmable microcontroller attached to a PC, then it is often easier to program on the PC and transfer a compiled C program as opposed to hacking with BASIC and assembly. However, this varies from application to application, with what the designers preferences are, and how old-school and hard-core of a hardware hacker that you are dealing with.
Since most Catholics ignore "official teachings" and use contraception, that's kind of beside the point. In Italy, where the Church arguably has more influence than any other country, the fertility rate (average number of births per woman) is 1.3, way below the "steady-state" rate of 2.1. Similar figures apply to other western European countries.
The main predictor of family size is not religion but wealth. Poor people have big families, rich people don't, for a variety of reasons. Yes, there are lots of well-known and well-off Catholic and Mormon families with umpteen kids, but most population pressure comes from social groups where poverty is endemic.