[ale] Please help me give away PCs.

[Jeff Hubbs]

> But the original poster was specifically interested in giving
> units to public school systems. So use the school system as a
> middle man to get the stuff into students' hands.

But the school system is just another Government agency, albeit one lower
down on the totem pole.

> One of your objections to giving old hardware to public schools
> is that they won't have any way of actually putting them to a
> reasonable educational use; and furthermore that having such a
> hardware pool would make it difficult for the school to obtain
> the budget to get the real hardware that they need.

I wasn't trying to say that they *won't* have *any* way of actually putting
them to a reasonable use but rather that they are *unlikely* to have *a* way
planned out and in place at the time the computers themselves enter the mix.
What I feel occurs instead is that the computers come in first, followed by
a short period of unfocused and unanswered "Now what??" followed by the
computers moldering in storage rooms.  

> If the school had a usage plan consisting of, "We will give these
> units to students on a one-per-comer, first-come-first-served basis,"
> that pretty much eliminates that objection. Sure some of
> these kids will pick one up and take it home thinking they're gonna
> play Quake IV on it, be disappointed, and they'll end up as doorstops.
> But the more persistent ones, even if their original motivation is
> just to kill off brain cells with video games, will figure out
> a way to do that - put Linux or FreeDOS on 'em, and learn a lot in
> the process. If the government is constrained to give the stuff to
> a publically-funded organization, this seems like a good way to
> do it. Obviously, the appropriate usage plan would have to be
> suggested to the school administration.

I would have to agree.  My hope is that the kids that are so motivated have
ready access to the stuff, limited only by their own determination, talent,
and motivation. 

 
> I had a similar experience to yours. At age 10 I picked up my
> dad's TI-59 programmable calculator, and within a month I was
> making it do stuff he'd never imagined. But that
> was a pretty limited piece of hardware. If I could have got
> my hands on any kind of "real" computer it would have made
> a huge difference to me. And I bet there are a lot of kids
> out there in similar positions, especially on the low end
> of the income scale.

Funny you should mention that.  In high school, I had one of the lesser
TI-58s (basically the same thing but without the card reader - the TI-59
tended to be the weapon of choice for the geeky kids from Lookout Mountain).
The last software writing I did on that system in high school was a BASIC
program that allowed the user to edit, store, and RUN TI-58/59 code.  
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