Update: Although I am leaving the text of the article below unchanged, a more recent Computerworld article brings to light the fact that the “$12 computer” sold in India is not in fact based on the Apple II at all, but rather on a contemporary piece of technology—the Nintendo Famicom. That the Famicom should have a computer based on it is not terribly surprising. Known as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in America, the Japanese iteration of the Famicom (or “Family Computer”) was a great deal more extensible than the American version, with a number of peripherals produced including a keyboard for BASIC programming and even a disk drive. Most of these were never seen outside of Japan. The Famicom also had a remarkably long lifespan; Nintendo of Japan only stopped accepting broken Famicoms for repair in 2007.
The fact that the Victor is an unlicensed clone is not expected to pose a problem, due to the 20 year term of patents in the United States.
India may recently have added a second zero to the cost of its “$10 laptop,” but India already has a $12 desktop computer, as an MIT student discovered while on an internship in India last summer. Based on the venerable old Apple II, this computer is a cheap set-top box hooked up to TV sets for simple gaming.
Now that MIT student, Derek Lomas, is part of a team working to improve this computer, adding memory and simple web access, hoping to use it to provide additional economic opportunities for people in developing countries. Says Lomas, “If you just know how to type, that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day.”
The Apple II has a long history of use for educational purposes. Back when I was in elementary and middle school, Apple IIs (and their Franklin Ace clones) were all over the school, used for administrative and educational tasks alike. (The school had assumed that Apple IIs would be the business machine of the future, and thought that providing students with a good grounding in them would stand them in good stead for their future lives. Nobody foresaw the PC revolution.) And in 2004, as a commenter in the Slashdot discussion of this article pointed out, Tiger Electronics put out the Tiger Learning Computer, a TV-linkable educational computer based on the Apple IIe.
One area where the $100-$200 laptop computers can be said to miss the boat is that, in developing countries, $100 or $200 is outside the purchasing power of the people who would use it—as far as they are concerned, it might as well be $1,000,000. If a family cannot afford to buy it, it must be paid for by a government or external aid group. But a $12 device might actually be affordable by the people who would use it—and if external aid groups did choose to provide them, their money would go ten times as far.
And when you get right down to it, perhaps developing countries do not necessarily need all of the innovations that the XO laptop offers. Perhaps their interests might be better served by a less expensive device for computing, and cellphones for communicating, rather than trying to combine the two. If that is the case, this Indian Apple II box could be more successful than any of the previous attempts at a third-world aid computer have been so far.
While there may be a 20 year patent window, I would be real surprised if there wasn’t copyrighted material (e.g., the BIOS) involved in the NES. I suspect Microsoft would have something to say if I decided to launch a DOS-based computer and e-mailed Microsoft that the 20 year patent window meant I didn’t have to pay for it (just 7 more years before I can deploy Windows 95 computers).
A $10 computer sounds great. It might even be possible–and Linux is available for free. But let’s not do it by violating copyright.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
I may be posting a few months after the article, but…
When the OLPC first came out and I saw the price and content, I was appalled. Not because of the doubling of the price, but because of the content of the systems.
Negroponte and others in the projects failed to recognize that their system requirements (video, audio, etc.) were unnecessary. The people who should be benefitting from cheap computers are people who HAVE no computers. To them, an 4.77KHz IBM-PC would be the latest technology.
If the system’s specs were set much lower, as the people choosing the Apple II are doing, it would have been much cheaper and more appropriate – you don’t need a GUI to read, and you don’t need fancy graphics or film. For example, CGA LCD screens at dirt-cheap prices running FreeDOS would have been enough, and there is a USB driver for DOS which works. Or if Microsoft really wanted to get invovled, they could have released Windows 3.1 into the public domain and the system be designed around 486 or PI chips that would cost next to nothing. Old tehcnology still works.
One sure sign of failure is arrogance. When I visited the website and made comment that the technology chosen was more than needed, I was met with the response that my thinking was “outdated” and “not relevant to what is needed”.
I myself do not use even 1% of my Vista Desktop facilities… I had a IBMPC1 back in the day and for my own use, rather than ‘entertainment’ I use the Vista for the same things, even wordprocessing in .txt (simply any computer will read .txt). Extras are nice but NOT needed people MUST buy stuff themselves. otherwise they will not be looked after, and the African/Indian whatever market must be allowed to discover what it wants.. These countries have millions of very bright people, what they need is the tools to help them make the step up, not our fakeass “charity”. Scratch a charity find well paying jobs for middle-class idiots…