[ale] Please help me give away PCs.

[Jeff Hubbs]

> Would it be at all possible to give these machines away
> to members of the home-schooling community? Or even
> directly to public school *students*, who can take them
> home and actually learn something from them?

Very likely, he can't.  

Federal agencies can't arbitrarily "give" stuff away - not even scrap.
There is supposed to be a process involved.  For the most part, the process
is auction - the general public's primary means to obtain Government surplus
and castoff stuff.  I have read where the Gov't is getting into the online
auction biz, but for the most part, you would contact the agency's field
offices' property/materiel mgt departments to find out about auctions.  

Giveaway programs such as what this one seems to be are almost always
carried out according to a strict mandate from above even when they are
locally executed.  

Government agencies for the most part seek to interact with private industry
and the general public in a fair manner, i.e., one that can't even be
construed as favoring a certain group or class (Affirmative Action and
minority-/woman-owned set-asides are of course an exception, and many such
programs are under heavy legal fire right now).  Public schools are just
about the only "sink" for these kinds of donations over which no one can
really raise a red flag.   

Joe, I personally like your idea in principle.  I can trace my entire
involvement with computing back to two key events.  One was an educational
toy I got for Xmas when I was maybe 9 years old - a kind of logic-array
"computer" that used pegs, sliding bars, and an array of lamps on which I
later learned to "code."  The other was given to me by my 7th-grade math
teacher.  I had brought in a copy of some electronics magazine (it was
either Popular Electronics or Radio and Electronics) and after class one day
I showed her this article that had diagrams of logic circuits, Karnaugh
maps, and a discussion of Boolean algebra.  She showed me this big cardboard
box stuffed in a storage locker in the back of her classroom, and in it was
an educational aid called Cardiac.  There was an instructor package and some
large number of student packages, and she sent me off with the instructor
package and one of the student packages.  Cardiac was a cardboard-and-pencil
CPU, with its own instruction set, RAM, and register structure.  In a few
days, I was coding in Cardiac "assembler!"

Although this much-better-than-average 7th-grade math teacher had the
Cardiac aid on hand (how she came to have it is unknown to me - she may have
just "inherited" it), she really didn't have the kind of class where she
could pass the things out and teach a lesson with it.  However, she saw my
interest in "things digital" and quite correctly intuited what an
appropriate next step would be.  The point I want to make about this story
is this: although this was c. 1976 and just about the only
generally-available thing you could call a "PC" at that time would have been
made by Altair, not that nor even one of the commercially-available mini
systems of the day from Control Data, Data General, Raytheon, HP, DEC, etc.
were necessary to teach computing AT A LEVEL APPROPRIATE FOR A
SEVENTH-GRADER.  I believe that even twenty-five years later, throwing piles
of PCs at grade school kids is not going to "prepare them for careers in the
'New Economy'/'21st Century'" - at least not "prepare" them in the sense
that the purveyors of such phraseology intend.  

If instead you set up kids with things like my little pegboard computer or
Cardiac and teach a lesson on it, some kids will be drawn to the concepts
and some kids will not.  Some kids will go on to write operating systems,
design games, engineer fuel injection systems, build Web pages.  Others will
write books (NOT O'Reilly, either!), study butterflies, fix cars, cut hair,
wait tables, play piano, re-tile bathrooms, take vitals, wash windows, drive
trucks.  Guess what?  We need ALL those people.  I am therefore in rough
agreement with Clifford Stoll in that our education system is wrong to
assume and promulgate the notion that kids should be guided in droves to BE
PROGRAMMERS!  Stoll says that if we educate too many people to become
programmers at the expense of educating people to be plumbers, neither our
programs nor our pipes will hold water - and if you as homeowners, car
owners, etc. have tried to get much "Old Economy" service work done around
here lately, you know it's getting progressively harder and harder to find
people who can perform that kind of work competently.  In some areas, it's
not a matter of whether you can get a given job done for what you're willing
to pay, but whether or not you can get someone to even consider a job as
small as yours at *any* price.  

So, it seems in my mind that perhaps the best thing a county or city school
district could do with a donation of machines such as these would be to make
them available to a group of kids throughout the district who are the most
inclined and capable to get gainful educational use out of them, as opposed
to somehow setting them up so that every kid in the school is forced to
write code!  

When I entered the 9th grade, there was a Data General mini at the school
that was set up with terminals and teletypes and a BASIC interpreter.  There
was no computer class at the time, but I along with a certain group of
like-minded students spent a great deal of free and after-class time there,
writing code mostly for our own consumption (although some of the same
students had coded apps that actually carried out school functions on the
same system).   



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Knapka [mailto:jknapka at charter.net]
> Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 7:52 AM
> To: Jeff Hubbs
> Cc: Christopher S. Adams; ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Please help me give away PCs.
> 
> 
> Would it be at all possible to give these machines away
> to members of the home-schooling community? Or even
> directly to public school *students*, who can take them
> home and actually learn something from them?
> 
> Obviously the average public school system is not going to
> be able to make systematic use of a bunch of crusty
> machines, but I think they could be a treasure trove
> for the individuals being "educated." I know I would
> have killed to get my hands on free hardware when
> I was 14 or so.
> 
> -- Joe
> (Big fan of self-directed education, after reading my
> stepdaughter's copy of "The Teenage Liberation Handbook"
> by Grace Lewellyn)
> 
> Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > 
> > Being a former ("escaped?") Fed myself, I presume that he's 
> limited to
> > public schools not of his own choice.  I think this other 
> fellow's point is
> > well taken - that this kind of giveaway is in effect 
> casting swine before
> > pearls.
> > 
> > I encountered a similar situation with the Department of 
> Energy.  They
> > wanted to make a big deal out of giving not tens but *many 
> hundreds* of
> > machines away.  I opposed the move on the following grounds:
> > 
> > 1.  The machines themselves would have been very 
> hard-pressed to deal with
> > the current MS OSses of the time (this was like 4-5 years 
> ago and my Linux
> > knowledge was miniscule), thereby greatly limiting their 
> value for running
> > commercial software of the day.
> > 
> > 2.  I asked to see any curriculum or lesson plan that would 
> have gainfully
> > utilized the machines.  I know from firsthand experience 
> that any such
> > "goodies" tend to get piled into closets and unused rooms 
> without a cogent
> > plan for their utilization.
> > 
> > 3.  The mere presence of these computers - and *knowledge* 
> of that presence
> > on the part of school boards and politicians - would likely 
> make it much
> > harder for faculty to justify the procurement of new, 
> modern machines for
> > reasonable and fully legitimate purposes.  I could forsee 
> someone saying
> > "COMPUTERS???  You want COMPUTERS?  The government just 
> gave us 1,000
> > computers!!!  You don't need no stinkin' COMPUTERS!!!!!" 
> and not at all
> > understanding that the distinction between a new computer and one of
> > equivalent cost five years back in time is all the 
> difference in the world
> > with respect to what can be accomplished with it.
> > 
> > Despite my passionately-argued points, the giveaway took 
> place, and I
> > imagine that you can find these machines standing in for 
> missing furniture
> > legs, serving as load-bearing members for many a 
> jury-rigged bookshelf, and
> > holding open many a door throughout the public school 
> systems of the Central
> > Savannah River Area (Bao Ha probably used some of those 
> very machines at
> > some time in the past).  Hands were shaken for press 
> photogs, glowing
> > articles were written, life went on.
> > 
> > Now, I believe that an all-Linux solution could make a 
> pallet-load of 486es
> > gainfully usable, but  although I am relatively certain 
> that examples of
> > such being done exist, it requires some improbably 
> determined, resourceful,
> > and smart faculty and equally improbably forward-thinking 
> and open-minded
> > school administrators to pull it off.
> > 
> > I am just sorry that we didn't hang on to the machines and 
> set up the
> > biggest, baddest Beowulf cluster of its kind (some people 
> at Oak Ridge
> > National Lab did just that with the "Stone 
> Soupercomputer").  We probably
> > could have amassed a 500-node cluster over the course of 
> less than a year.
> > How we could have powered, cooled, and UPSsed such a 
> monstrosity would have
> > been a whole 'nother story.
> > 
> > - Jeff
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Christopher S. Adams [mailto:toiletduk at penguinpowered.com]
> > > Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 2:57 PM
> > > To: ale at ale.org
> > > Subject: Re: [ale] Please help me give away PCs.
> > >
> > >
> > > have you tried private schools and orphanages? since they're not
> > > state-funded, they would probably appreciate the pc's
> > >
> > > or if you want to be really charitable, you can give them to me :)
> > >
> > > Chris
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: <tew at wiencko.com>
> > > To: <nixpop at hotmail.com>
> > > Cc: <ale at ale.org>
> > > Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 2:40 PM
> > > Subject: Re: [ale] Please help me give away PCs.
> > >
> > >
> > > > Al Gore and the Federal Government is taxing my
> > > communications services to
> > > > death to provide state of the art PCs and internet access
> > > to schools and
> > > > libraries all over the country.
> > > >
> > > > I don't think you'll find too many public schools willing
> > > to take obsolete
> > > > equipment when they can get new stuff for free.  Now, if
> > > you were willing
> > > to
> > > > support some non-taxpayer financed charatible institutions,
> > > then I think
> > > you
> > > > might find an audience.
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, 20 July 2000, "Jon Rennie" wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Off topic but in line with a recent thread.
> > > > >
> > > > > I have between 60 and 100 PCs and almost as many monitors
> > > and a few
> > > other
> > > > > things to give away.  There are conditions.  I work for
> > > the federal
> > > > > government.  I need to find a tax-payer supported educational
> > > institution
> > > > > (school)  somewhere in the Kindergarten through 12th
> > > grade range to take
> > > > > this stuff.
> > > > >
> > > > > The greatest number of the CPUs is Dell Optiplex 433s/L
> > > CPUs (having a
> > > 33MHz
> > > > > '486SX chip) with 8MB RAM average and minimum 210 MB hard
> > > drive.  A few
> > > > > systems have better specs and I have some garbage lesser
> > > systems I need
> > > to
> > > > > get rid of.  The 433s and better have 10BaseT cards.  The
> > > monitors are
> > > > > mostly Dell color 14" ones.
> > > > >
> > > > > Please help.  Perhaps you can interest a school in
> > > teaching some kids to
> > > set
> > > > > up Linux routers/firewalls/whatever.
> > > > >
> > > ______________________________________________________________
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> -- Joe Knapka
> * What happens when a mysterious force meets an inscrutable object?
> 
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