23,000
How Henrico County became an iBook innovator before it became a weird footnote
$4M
A white second-generation iBook G3. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The day that Henrico County’s wide-scale iBook experiment turned ugly
The public announcement that the district was getting rid of a thousand iBooks created a frenzy, one that spread far beyond the school district’s borders and hit the international news. For one thing, Apple blogs drew attention to the event, and Apple fans are crazy, so many of them legitimately discussed traveling long distances to get a $50 laptop.A unique opportunity is available from Henrico County Public Schools. Used Apple iBook laptop computers will be on sale for $50 each, with a one-per-person limit. The one-day sale will be held Tuesday, Aug. 9 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
One thousand laptops will be sold at the school warehouse—361 Dabbs House Road beside the Eastern Government Center—on a first-come, first-serve basis. Only cash or checks will be accepted.
The white, Power PC 750s with 12-inch screens have 320 megabytes of memory, Mac OS 10.2.8, and AppleWorks 6.2.9.
Trying to find images or video of this thing that happened was surprisingly hard; I couldn’t even find video of the incident. Here’s a contemporary screenshot of a news report at the time. Image: Internet Archive