So I was thinking about the Metaverse the other day, (funny how often I do that) and the idea of being able to jack into a network on any street corner from a pay booth really appealed to me. Basically by my estimation there are tons of old computers from the 70s sitting in warehouses somewhere waiting to be tossed in landfills etc. Pretty much useless to anyone, but they have all the capability you’d need to get basic email connectivity.

Now what we need is some enterprising gentleman to go around and buy up all these obsolete consoles for virtually no cost, and then install a communications network to hook them up to the internet virtually everywhere. Imagine if next to every payphone was a Streetmail booth where you could drop in a quarter and send a quick email to anyone.

A similar concept exists in the cybercafes that have sprung up in many 3rd world countries and many developed countries that aren’t the US. The problem they have is that they try to be everything: email console, jukebox, arcade, and chatroom all in one. So naturally they have to slosh out the dough for decent hardware.

The advantage here is that these machines would be so cheap that it would be feasible to install them everywhere. There’s a huge resource of ‘obsolete’ machines that are just going to waste. The monochrome 80-character displays of the Apple ][ era are not good for much, but they’d be more than enough to provide widespread email access to anybody walking down the street.

Cool idea, I hope someone implements it.