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

How to solve world hunger:

[PunkOfLinux]

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!

Re:How to solve world hunger:

[JCSoRocks]

Those messages are a lot less funny when your brother/sister/mom/dad/cousin/bff/whatever really *has* just died of dysentery/starvation/typhoid/whatever.

Re:How to solve world hunger:

[Nimey]

If you could get the damned Catholic Church to quit opposing contraception, that'd help quite a bit as well.

skip to the end, please

[eekygeeky]

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.

Re:neat idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Regression

[Ukab the Great]

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.

Re:Sweet

[SnapShot]

I can say the text quality on a CRT television is absolutely horrible, totally unusable for browsing or programming.

Maybe unsuitable for browsing, my good sir, but my Timex Sinclair 1000 and I can assure you that a CRT television is perfectly suitable for programming!

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).