[Click to see full size picture] Anguilla, Leeward Islands, Caribbean

Anguilla Library Computer Club

Anguilla is a small island in the Caribbean. The objective of our club is to foster computer literacy in all Anguillans, especially children. Please visit the club's home page and see some pictures of Anguilla's children.

The club has moved meetings and lessons into larger quarters at the back of the Arts and Crafts Center (immediately to the right of the library). This room is 3 times the size of our old room in the National Trust building.

If you have something small to donate, like memory SIMMs or a motherboard, you can mail it to:

Anguilla Library Computer Club
Box 931
The Valley
Anguilla, British West Indies
If you have something larger, like a room full of old Pentiums, email us and we will discuss shipping (which can be a major problem).

Big Donation

Dave Thomas made a very generous donation of $4,000 in late 1998 which was stretched to purchase eight refurbished Pentium-class systems for the computer lab. Now that we have CD-ROM and sound, there is a lot more we can expose the club members to in the way of software.

Read all about it on the Anguilla News web site.

Who Donated the Computers?

Some of our computers were donated through the Anguilla Computes! program, where the donor only needs to ship the computer to Pittsburg and a charity does the rest (and you can get a tax receipt for the donation). We just received a shipment of four boxes that were donated 8 months ago, so this channel is not that fast!

While reading the list below, it may seem like we have hundreds of computers. This is untrue. Many of the machines were quite old when donated and have died since then.

The Club sends it's heartfelt thanks to the many people who have donated, and gone to the trouble of figuring out how to get their equipment to Anguilla!

  • Compaq Computer - Pentium 120
  • Dell Computer - 486
  • Dell 15" Color Monitor (nice! Used immediately in a course)
  • 2 Keyboards
  • Epson Scanner
  • In September 1997 we received gave an unused 1,2GB IDE-HDD from Greets from Germany, ingob in Germany ( [email protected] ). Very useful for machines with broken hard drives! 
  • Xiaolin Zang, Dave Eckhardt, and Roy Liu of Pittsburgh, PA:

> http://www.offshore.com.ai/computerclub/ccsep23b.jpg is clearly a picture
> of the keyboard from the 386 we gave you.  Did that machine end up being
> donated to the computer club?

Yes, it did!   Bob, please add them to the list of people
who have donated to the club.

Thanks to all of you,
  • Air Conditioning!

    click to enlarge air conditioner

    We have had a very generous $2000 donation from a villa owner at CoveCastles to buy an air conditioner for the club. We raised some extra money on our own and purchased a 60,000 BTU air conditioner, plenty to keep 30 children and 20 computers cool even through the summer.

  • Margie Morani. MAC Powerbook, needs a new SCSI drive in order to work. We actually got this working for a few days by combining with another dead PowerBook from Travis Ferland. Fravis also donated a lot of Mac software!
  • In August 1998 we had a donation of 4 macs from a very generous friend. At least one runs without assistance!
  • Peter Burling and the Dive Shop. A cool DEC PC with 21" monitor, but it needs a SCSI drive too. Hmmm... where can we find a couple of "spare" SCSI drives.
  • Eric and Judy Jones. 386 motherboard.
  • Larry and Gretchen Shaw. 386 motherboard and lots of diskettes. And a lot of time while they were here (they had the good luck to arrive just as we were setting up our Compaq network). Larry suggested some ways to make Win95 kid-proof using the Policy Editor, but we haven't gotten that to work yet. It would be easier with a Windows NT server, if anyone is feeling generous.
  • Bob and Mary Ann Green. Ten refurbished Compaq Net/One 486sx25 PCs. Deal arranged through Gayle Enzel, former used computer broker now resident in Anguilla. Shipping arranged by Ronnie Bates while visiting in Toronto. Software loaded and configured by Leroy Hill, Vince Cate, Jason Butterworth, Ruel Phillips, Errol James and Larry Shaw. Network cables built by Jason Butterworth. Two of the systems came with only 4 MB of memory instead of 8MB, so we need some 72-pin parity SIMMS in either 4MB or 8MB ($39 retail price as of August 23, 1997).
  • Keith Hayes. 386 motherboard and memory.
  • Bob Kharasch. Nice monitor with a minor adjustment problem (fixed by the club members). And a nice Toshiba 486 color notebook (Satellite T1850C) with a broken hard drive. We boot it from diskette and use it as a dedicated Word Rescue machine! If anyone has a broken notebook computer with a working hard drive, feel free to take the hard drive out and mail it to us.
  • Shawn Vita at Howard Johnson, Seattle. A computer and monitor. Thanks.
  • Sally Janin who brought some equipment donated by her old law firm in Washington DC when she moved her. This included an IBM PS/2 with 720K floppies that was a big challenge to Junior Error James to make useful (we boot it from diskette!). And a nice LaserJet II, for which we received cartridge donations from Stott and Co, Carimar, and Larry Shaw, amoung others!
  • Dan Greenberg. Several boxes of mother boards, disk drives, controllers, and other neat stuff.
  • One of our local banks (which one?) donated an IBM System 36 system (the precursor to the AS/400 that IBM sells to banks and businesses to maintain databases, ship orders, etc.). We haven't figured out what to do with this yet.
  • Straw Hat Restaurant donated a box of multi-media software - very neat stuff.
  • Stephen Donahue, Maryland.First computer donated, a nice 386 with a color monitor. Thanks Steve!
  • Robert and Mary McGinnis, Ithaca, N.Y., and old Toshiba laptop that has gotten a lot of good use.
  • Brad Krause of Kinko's Northwest, who donated six IBM PS/2 systems to the Anguillan Government, which freed up six older computers for use by children.
  • Harry Subin of Bedford, New York, who donated a cute little 8086 Compaq laptop that will run Googol Math Games, Typing, Spreadsheet, Build a Fish, and several CGA games too frivolous to mention here.
  • Bob and Mary Ann Green, Island Harbour, Anguilla, who donated a Pentium Clone with UPS. This wouldn't have been possible without the help of Vince Cate who did the comparison shopping in California and brought the PC back on the airplane with him.
  • Vince Cate of Offshore Information Services Ltd. in Anguilla who donated an old XT system with 5-1/4" floppy. A challenge!
  • Duncan Stott of Anguilla who donated a tall 386 tower. Thanks.
  • Chris Young of Cable and Wireless Anguilla who donated a scanner.
  • Clifton James in Anguilla donated a mono PC which is excellent for Typing and Spreadsheet lessons.
  • Gordon Cillis who teaches at our high school donated his original IBM PC/XT running DOS 3, but it has a hard drive and is busy running "Typing Made Easy".
  • Roy's Place on Crocus Bay donated their old PC loaded with interesting software.
  • Robelle, a software firm in Canada, has passed on an old Zenith Laptop (if you have a very large, very strong lap), four HP and Compaq 286's with three monitors (two of them nice color EGA monitors), plus 4 matched 9600 baud error-correcting US Robotics Courier HST modems (obsolete but extremely reliable). Perhaps we can set up a local bulletin board or freenet.
  • Maggie Mitchell of Mitchell's Chambers in Anguilla has donated an old Toshiba 3100 laptop with a beautiful red screen. Of course it runs DOS 2.11 and has a 720K floppy drive, but we can cope with problems like that.
  • Ighanyia Christian of ANT has loaned her old 286 system. And we got it to work!
  • John Rogers the surveyer, who donated a 386 Tower.
  • Dick Peltier dropped by to visit and left us a 33.6 modem. Great for our anticipated Internet access.
  • Vince Amarosa brought a box of wonderful things with him on his recent vacation in Anguilla: a 386 motherboard, VGA boards, controller boards, software (Civilization, SimEarth, etc.), all in original boxes with manuals and driver software. Thanks.
  • Cable and Wireless has donated a telephone line and an 20 hours of Internet access a month. The members have starting surfing the net and creating web pages. The club has email at [email protected]
  • Bruce Toback of OPT,Inc in Phoenix donated his old 386 motherboard, plus a SCSI cable so we can try to get a Mac PowerBook working (that was donated by Marge Morani). Bruce is looking for an external SCSI drive for it too (he likes the Mac).
  • John Bedford dropped by with a nice motherboard and some interface cards. Thanks.

    Computer Club Now In Arts/Craft Center

    On our first meeting in the new facility, Nancy Peace of Massachusetts dropped in with a Panasonic printer to donate. (Click the picture of her and Vince to see it larger.) And she brought ribbons, a manual, and some ideas on how to get it to work. With her help we were able to connect it to an old HP Vectra DOS system and start printing announcements and cards. While Nancy visited with us, her friend had a lesson from Miguel on designing a house on the computer. [Click to see full size picture]

    Soon after we had a visit from Teacher Joanne Clark's second grade class at Linda Banks' Omolulu School here in Anguilla. The students practiced arithmetic skills in a version of Space Invaders, identified words in Word Rescue, made Mother's Day cards with our new printer, wrote short letters to the teacher in a word processor, and learned to type.

    Klaus, the photographer from Wired magazine, dropped in and took numerous pictures of the children. He was here to shoot photos for an upcoming article on the Financial Cryptography 97 conference. Unfortunately, none of these pictures made it into the magazine article.

    Chris Mason of the DIGEST cable TV show shot a segment on the computer club. You can buy the tape at All Island Cable TV-- it is very professional and fun.

    Return the the Club's Lesson/Software site.