One (Ten Dollar) Laptop Per Child? Repurposed NES System Holds the Key

I’m a big fan of the late great Indiana University business professor Richard Farmer. His signature book, Farmer’s Law: Junk In a World of Affluence, should be required reading in business and education schools. Check out one of my articles for Converge Magazine a few years back for more details.

Farmer noted a society’s influence could be gauged by what was thrown away. The more affluent a society, the more valuable its junk. He was an advocate of repurposing equipment and technologies, sending “old” materials to developing countries to help them speed development. This has in fact been occurring for some time to one extent or another. Americans old enough to remember soda pop in returnable bottles might be surprised to find them still in use when visiting third world countries. When a factory in the West modernizes, its obsolete equipment often goes overseas.

Back in the 1970s, when Farmer wrote his book, he suggested a good way to repurpose old vehicles would be to unload them on beaches off India. He speculated the cars would soon be repaired and placed back in good service. Now, it’s hardly fair to call India a third world country anymore. But there are some older technologies still in service there, and this includes gaming consoles once dominant in our marketplace 20 or 30 years ago.

Eric Lai over at PCWorld reports on Derek Lomas, a grad student who stumbled across the old style consoles while on an internship in Bangalore. The system Lomas discovered in the marketplace there is a knock-off of the old Nintendo NES system, an 8 bit console. The system takes NES cartridges and hooks up to television sets. Lomas had the brainy idea of adapting the unit for an über-cheap computer.

This idea makes a lot of sense for developing markets. Most households in developing countries, regardless of socioeconomic status, already have television sets. The monitor in any portable computer system can be the single most expensive component. Therefore, providing just the guts of a computer and using a television as the monitor is simply brilliant, especially for homes with very low incomes.

Lomas documents the discovery in his blog here. Jerry Kronenberg at the Boston Herald reports Lomas participated in the International Design Summit at MIT this month, birthplace of the One Laptop Per Child idea, otherwise known as the “$100 laptop.” Lomas’ team hopes to add memory to the device, a keyboard, and cell phone access for Internet browsing.

Nicholas Negroponte, who spearheaded OLPC at MIT, is another professor who has put big ideas for developing countries into action, like Richard Farmer back in the day. If Lomas is successful, he’ll be following in good footsteps.

References:
Kronenberg, J. (2008, August 4). Designers on quest to build $12 computer. [Online]. Retrieved August 9, 2008 from http://news.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/
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