Retro: The Kano Computer


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It?s a story we?re all familiar with: Two hungry young geeks meet in a garage to collaborate on something no one has ever seen. Their first product is a humble circuit board, hardly useful to anyone who isn?t also a geek. But it ultimately leads to devices that change the world.

Of course I?m talking about the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak. But I could just as easily be talking about two folks you probably haven?t heard of.

Alex Klein and Yonatan Raz-Fridman are the co-founders of Kano, a brand-new startup that?s looking to bring the ideals of early Apple ? and the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned Apple and many of the other early computer titans ? to a new generation.

The Apple I was essentially a circuit board with a power supply. To turn it into a working computer, you had to add your own case, keyboard, monitor, and other essential bits. The $129 Kano kit is what a lot of early Apple I users might have wanted. It has the computer circuit board (the Raspberry Pi, which is widely available), but Kano also provides the case, wireless keyboard, WiFi dongle, cables, and Linux OS on a memory card. It?s a nearly complete computer.

The problem is not that kids have too much technology in their lives, says co-founder Klein. It?s that there are so few opportunities to tinker with it. Hermetically sealed tablets and smartphones are wonderful devices that let you do amazing things, but you can?t really mess around with them. You can?t even replace the batteries.

The idea behind Kano was to create a computer that?s so easy to build that an 8-year-old can do it. And then, once he?s built it, he can learn how to program it.

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