Students at MIT are taking the old Apple II architecture and developing Internet capable computers that could be sold for about $12.

A $12 computer of sorts – a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console – already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

But Lomas, an American graduate student who stumbled across the computers in Bangalore while on an internship last summer, hit on the idea of upgrading the devices’ 1980s-era technology.

He and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium hope to soup up the systems – which are based on old Apple II computers – with rudimentary Web access and more.

“My generation all had Apple IIs that we learned to type and play games on,” the 27-year-old said. “If we can get buy-in from programmers, we can develop these devices and give (Third World) schools Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with.”

I guess I’m a sucker for the low end of the computer revolution. Certainly you can buy a multi-core monster with all the bells and whistles for a few thousand dollars, but I’ve always been fascinated by what a few dollars and a lot of ingeniuity can accomplish. We will have crossed a very important milestone when an Internet capable computer shows up in my kid’s Happy Meal.

More cheap electronics blogging:

Back in December of 2006 I replaced my failing cellphone with a GoPhone. No, I didn’t get fleeced with the pay-as-you-go deal. I dropped in the SIM from the last phone and it was good to go on my regular plan. At $20 it was so cheap that I considered it disposable. I could go through 3 or 4 of those a year and be money ahead on getting a new phone out of my service provider. I figured I’d use it for a few months and then get some flavor of smart phone.

That GoPhone lasted until late last month – more than a year and a half. It holds the record for longest service of any cellphone to be carried by Stephen Gordon. Actually it was still working. The only problem was that the ringer kept getting quieter until I couldn’t hear it to take a call anymore. I replaced it with another cheap phone.

I’m sure at some point I’ll step up to an iPhone – its far enough up the high end to offer sufficient value to make it worth the leap. But I see no reason to go middle-of-the-road on a cell phone. Why pay $100 for a mid-range phone when $20-$30 will get you something that has 95% of the mid-range features?

Via GeekPress.

Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute

“an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now.”

with respect to early twenty-first century technology?

Please discuss in the comments.

P.S. I think I’ll do some checking into how the economics of the capsule contents might have been improved. I’ll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes of that.

UPDATE (Moments later): a bit of searching yields a price range of about $900 to $11,000 for similar era Belvederes in conditions ranging from semi-restored to … iffy. A restored 1956 done by hot-rod legend Boyd Coddington’s shop goes for $29,500

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

I’m reminded of Doc Brown’s 70 year preservation of his time traveling Delorean:

Notice how this was portrayed in Back to the Future III. Dr. Brown put the vehicle up on pylons. It’s covered. And it’s in a sealed room.

A mine would be far superior to a natural cave because caves tend to be damp (they’re usually formed by water). The preserver could choose a place in the mine where drainage is assured. Barring a cave-in or the renewed mining activities, this sort of time capsule would be perfect.

But even as portrayed in BTTF III, certain parts – like the rubber wheels – didn’t fare so well. Even a carefully preserved car would need a lot of work before it would be ready for the highway.

I’m rough on cell phones. Any cell phone I carry will be folded, spindled and mutilated before being dropped from a height onto concrete (2005′s phone), or fumbled into a swimming pool (1999′s phone), or put through the washing machine (this year’s mishap).

So when I discovered my very clean but very dead cell this week in the wash, I figured I had three options:

1. Shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a new phone at my Cingular dealer;

2. Get the same phone either free or cheap from the same dealer by signing an extended service agreement; or
3. Buy a Cingular-compatible phone cheaply on eBay and drop in the SIM card from the dead phone.

Confident that I will kill whatever phone I choose within a year, option 1 seems foolish. And I don’t like option 2 because I don’t want to get locked in forever with one carrier. If I had signed a new service agreement every time I destroyed a phone my commitment to Cingular would now stretch out a decade. What if Verizon offers a better deal next month? Man, this bird gonna fly!

Since I hadn’t lost the washed phone I knew I could just transfer the SIM chip into another Cingular-compatible phone. So I was just about to purchase one off eBay – and wait the week or so for it to be shipped to me – when I learned about option 4:

4. Buy a $20 GoPhone.

Yeah, that’s right. One of those pay-as-you-go phones that you’d buy for Ralphie:

The helpful clerk at Wal-Mart explained that you don’t have to pay-as-you-go if you don’t want to (paying as you go costs much more per minute than being on a standard plan). There’s a pay-as-you-go SIM included in the GoPhone package. Ignore that and drop your regular Cingular SIM into the Cingular GoPhone and you’ll be up and running immediately with your old number on your regular service plan. Your phone book list should make the trip too.

$20 later I’m talking again. And this isn’t some ugly clunker of a phone either:

The GoPhone wouldn’t be sufficient for everyone. There’s no camera, fancy games, or Internet surfing. It’s a voice phone that can also send and receive text messages. That’s about it.

But I carry a PDA for those other functions. For me, this is perfect. This is the disposable phone I’ve been waiting for. I could destroy a half-dozen of these $20 models in ’07 and be money ahead.