This cuddly little green guy to the right is the Humane Reader, a computer specifically designed to provide low-cost computing solutions to places without Internet access.

How low-cost? Twenty bucks. Yep, for less than the cost of two movie tickets, you can now buy an educational computer.

What’s really neat is the design. It’s 8-bit to keep costs down, and instead of a monitor, it just needs a TV with a composite input to display information. The memory is a 2GB SD card, which is included in the twenty bucks. And, of course, it’s got a USB port. Also a PS/2 port, because we guess some schools have to raid the very back of the e-waste containers to find a keyboard that works.

We’re sure that this will help humanity immeasurably, but we’re also fairly sure, especially since it’s open source, that this will suffer OLPC Syndrome; namely, people will buy it solely to turn it into an emulator. You can start destroying the dreams of naive people who want to save the world by downloading the open source design plans from their official site.

[ via Technabob ]