This CNN Hero upcycles old computers to open new worlds for young Kenyans
This CNN Hero upcycles old computers to open new worlds for young Kenyans
I was looking in through the open door of a school-owned computer in Nairobi, Kenya, last night to watch CNN Hero, an experimental program designed by Harvard researcher Alex Williams in the mid-1990s that allowed students with old or low-end computers to use them at college while receiving college credit. That meant the computer at Nairobi’s Gokushu Primary School could send an email to the school’s web site. And the computer that opened a window into a new world for me was a PC whose memory had been stuffed full of random programs.
“Are you a college student?” the school’s computer asked. I said yes. “Did you have this computer when you were a kid?” Its screen flashed an image of the school’s Web site. I hit “yes” again and took a sip of tea.
I’m not the first to learn about this program. It has been widely covered in the media, including by Tech.Co readers, several times. Alex Williams, who is now a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, has made a big public about his creation. But that’s not as big a deal as the school he created with computer scientist John Shulgin in Nairobi, Kenya, just nine years ago.
The program’s inventor was not the first to upcycle an obsolete computer to create a school computer. One does have to check the date. But the computer in my room was built in 1992, and it was never meant to work like this. It was the middle of the last century when I’d begun school. A few of my friends had PCs then, but they were used for learning how to use the Internet. It made sense to me to take my own computer home and make it do what I wanted with it. I made a list of my online newsgroups, and then an online journal about a group of Kenyan women I was following. I put in a plug for the book I was doing, and then I hit delete. My computer, still running on Windows 95, looked exactly like this. (Here’s a video of the moment.)