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A $20 8-Bit Wikipedia Reader For Your TV
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired about another entry in the ongoing quest for low-tech-high-tech educational tools to take advantage of distributed knowledge: "The Humane Reader, a device designed by computer consultant Braddock Gaskill, takes two 8-bit microcontrollers and packages them in a 'classic style console' that connects to a TV. The device includes an optional keyboard, a micro-SD Card reader and a composite video output. It uses a standard micro-USB cellphone charger for power. In all, it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books, including an offline version of Wikipedia, and requires no internet connection. The Reader will cost $20 when 10,000 or more of it are manufactured. Without that kind of volume, each Reader will cost about $35."
That's $2.50 per bit!
Outrageous!
Reading from the screen is not hard. Even on old TV sets. Teletext exists since ages and nobody complains about it being unreadable. In fact in today technological society there are already more people reading more from screens of some kind, than from paper. With such cheap device as the one in the article, the ratio of people reading from screen versus the people reading from paper will increase even more in favour of the ones readering from screen.
so presumably they'll be trying to read masses of blurry text on an older SDTV.
Until the "IBM PC" came along, most of us hooked our home computers to our televisions:
http://www.vintagecomputer.net/apple/appleII/appleII_display_graph.jpg
We wrote BASIC programs, played ZORK, and labouriously keyed in source code printed in the likes of "Creative Computing." Today, none of us are blind. Well, some of us are. But likely for other reasons than reading text on an SDTV.
Now get off my lawn.
You might want to check out the statistics as related by the company making these devices. The developing world has a glut of TVs but very few computers and little Internet access. These devices can help fill that gap.
Check out my world simulator thingy.