Wonder what it would cost to mass-produce a p166-like system with nowadays technology...

Wow hopefully it will have at least sinclair zx81 performance.

Oh dear... This sounds a lot like the usual arrogance of the "developed" countries against the "undeveloped" ones. Like saying "8-bit machines are good enough for them". If we really wanted to, we could easily give a "real" computer (maybe some Pentium II/III grade machine, which would be much closer to the systems you need to know to live in "our" capitalistic world) to every child in an "undeveloped" country (or a few to each school, whatever), for free. But that would create a very inconvenient contest situation quite soon, wouldn't it? In european medieval times, this principle worked quite well: keep the majority of people away from knowledge, and you can easily tell them tales, and thus rule them. This is how the church, and a lot of aristocrat families, rose to power.

I don't understand your critical view ADDiCT. Computers has transformed from being initially advanced calculators (for the military), to tools for data storage and analysis (for government and business), and now, to tools for communication and learning.

You mentioned medieval times. Back then communication was very limited. Books were written by hand and was incredible expensive. And they were mostly written in Latin, so they were also unusable as a communication tool for anyone but the church and the aristocrats.

Then Gutenberg arrived and suddenly posters, pamphlets and books could be made that was affordable. And books began to appear in the local language. In my view, it was no coincidence that Martin Luther and the protestant reformation rose a 100 years later, because without the mass communication provided by the printed press, no one would have really known about it.

Fast forward to 30 years ago, 1980 or so. The Soviet Union is going down. Their productivity can simply not compete with the west which has now begun to use computers in earnest (as the aforementioned tools for data storage and analysis). The production process simply becomes much more efficient, generating cheaper and better products for everyone. While in Soviet, you still have factories spewing out 5000 left-foot shoes and no right-foots shoes. And people are starting to notice too. The Soviet government tried desperately to control access to typewriters, stencil duplicators, xerox copiers, fax machines - anything that could be used for mass communication. Every device was tagged, access was on a fill-out-this-tripplet-form basis, etc, etc. But in the end it did not work. 2nd hand fax machines secretly imported, and Sony Walkmans and cassette tapes were impossible to control in the end, and as a result people were able to take control of their own lives.

You see the same methods used in China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Zimbabwe, and everywhere where a non-democratic government desperately tries to stay in control by limiting the means of free communication.

In my view, it is a communication tool that the computer holds the greatest promise, both for individual freedom, and for freedom from poverty. When the farmer in a remote Sudanese village can check todays selling price of grain in the capital, the travelling buyer from Big Company XYZ can no longer buy his crop for an all to cheap price. When the farmer can communicate with his peers and organize co-operatives, then he will have freedom and the beginning of a better life. When women and children of all ages can start learning how to read and write, they can break free of the cultural enslavement they are currently forced to live in.

It is here that the cheap $12 computer will find its role, in the same way as I accessed Usenet News, and used ASCII-only e-mail on my trusted Dasher DG210 terminal in glorious 25x80 yellow-on-brown colours. Not for playing World of Warcraft, not for learning MS Word or MySQL, but as a tool for communication, for accessing bulletin boards, for sharing ideas and visions!

/me steps down from his soap-box.

In no way am I mocking the zx81 but really the thing can't even produce sound. It is very out of date for todays standard. Look at those little kiddle toy computers with just the games built in. They have some nice graphics and sounds going.

Nice speech, MiniMax! (; Of course, computers are a tool for "emancipation", so to say. All i'm saying is that it would be possible, and would make sense, to give these people _real_ computers, and not outdated 8-bit sh*t. You won't get much relevant information via terminal emulation nowadays, and you won't learn about relevant OS's or applications.

Agreed. Old P3 laptops/destops are so old businesses usually end up tossing them in the trash because they don't want to have to pay for shipping. (or they have collectors come and pick them up for a couple of bucks). There are so many old computers in the world I can't believe they couldn't be given to other countries instead of just tossing them.

and give (Third World) schools Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with.

WTF are you going to do with an APPLE II computer lab and how is it relevant to today?

“We think we can develop a really good educational tool that could give kids exposure to keyboards, typing and mouse usage at an early age

Oh, I guess this is what they would do. Unfortunately they'll be typing/mousing around on a custom designed OS that has no modern equivalent. I guess if all they care about is web access then that might be fine.....although I doubt the browser would be that great. They mention "rudimentary Web access". What's that? I guess just an "internet" they access via their ISP that just has very simple web pages for communication among the people in the same area?

With all those old computers (PC by the way, since if I mentioned all the other non X86 CPU based computers then it woldn´t be what I was thinking off) you could in reality make the coolest computer cluster ever, and you could use it helping things, such as renderfarms and what not.

The idea is far from new, the hardware on which their test device was based, the Nintendo Family Computer, was a console that with an addon keyboard and cassette recorder interface, could function as a computer more or less. The problem is that little software took advantage of the keyboard and only a little more the cassette recorder. I do not include the Famicom Disk System here because no software for that addon used the keyboard.

Great Hierophant wrote:

The idea is far from new, the hardware on which their test device was based, the Nintendo Family Computer, was a console that with an addon keyboard and cassette recorder interface, could function as a computer more or less. The problem is that little software took advantage of the keyboard and only a little more the cassette recorder. I do not include the Famicom Disk System here because no software for that addon used the keyboard.

Great Hierophant, you should be a member of The ASSEMblergames.com message board - home of the obscure , or for that matter nesdev.parodius.com because of your knowledge, since what you are talking about is the Family basic package, which has now gone into the NOAC clones too, such as the PC KID III and other "pc based" famiclones.
Damn man, you are awesome.

www.beaglebox.com - sure it's $49 now, but with some feature culling (no need for DVI-D for example, smaller RAM) it could be quite perfect as a powerful yet cheap Third World altenative. All this discussion of 8 bit computing is cute but really not useful for Third World residents who want to become connected to the internet.

WolverineDK wrote:

Great Hierophant wrote:

The idea is far from new, the hardware on which their test device was based, the Nintendo Family Computer, was a console that with an addon keyboard and cassette recorder interface, could function as a computer more or less. The problem is that little software took advantage of the keyboard and only a little more the cassette recorder. I do not include the Famicom Disk System here because no software for that addon used the keyboard.

Great Hierophant, you should be a member of The ASSEMblergames.com message board - home of the obscure , or for that matter nesdev.parodius.com because of your knowledge, since what you are talking about is the Family basic package, which has now gone into the NOAC clones too, such as the PC KID III and other "pc based" famiclones.
Damn man, you are awesome.

Thank you for your warm words. I am a member of the NESDev forum, but in that company I often feel insignificant because I cannot understand all the technical details they discuss there. I will definitely look into ASSEMBlergames.

Great Hierophant wrote:

WolverineDK wrote:

Great Hierophant wrote:

The idea is far from new, the hardware on which their test device was based, the Nintendo Family Computer, was a console that with an addon keyboard and cassette recorder interface, could function as a computer more or less. The problem is that little software took advantage of the keyboard and only a little more the cassette recorder. I do not include the Famicom Disk System here because no software for that addon used the keyboard.

Great Hierophant, you should be a member of The ASSEMblergames.com message board - home of the obscure , or for that matter nesdev.parodius.com because of your knowledge, since what you are talking about is the Family basic package, which has now gone into the NOAC clones too, such as the PC KID III and other "pc based" famiclones.
Damn man, you are awesome.

Thank you for your warm words. I am a member of the NESDev forum, but in that company I often feel insignificant because I cannot understand all the technical details they discuss there. I will definitely look into ASSEMBlergames.

Well, you could ask calpis he knows the technical jargon and he could help you with that. He has an awesome knowledge or you could ask kevtris (Kevin Horton is his real name he owns the site Bluetech http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/ ) But if you ask Calpis, then say hi from me. Since I think he is a cool dude, whom I have had my fair share arguments and cool happenings over the internet on the ASSEMbler forum. But enough of my BS, but Calpis, and Kevtris are cool people who can help you with the jargon. If you ask them nicely 😀 and they are both members of nesdev.

Calpis has exstensive knowledge of old copiers. But I believe he knows a lot more. About other great stuff.