The marvel of the last legislative session was the deft way in which Gov. Angus King ushered through his “Laptops for Lunchboxes” proposal. The idea of equipping every seventh-grader with a laptop computer was met with nearly statewide derision upon its unveiling early last spring. It was pronounced dead early and often by lawmakers of both parties.

The governor persisted with his vision of putting Maine’s very good schools on the cutting edge, he backed up his position with solid research and emerged with a technology fund of at least $40 million and the authority to appoint a commission to decide how to best use it.

The names of those who will serve on that commission will be announced no later than next week. In advance of that, Gov. King made a suggestion Monday that makes clear his understanding of technology in education is sound and his negotiating skills still sharp.

The suggestion was that the commission consider – just consider – the use of machines called “thin clients” instead of laptops and that they be placed in school libraries to be checked out like books instead of being the property of the students.

Thin clients are a relatively new development in hardware. They are smaller, lighter, cheaper and less powerful than laptops. They contain no hard drive and connect to the Internet only through a server, a central computer.

The appeal of the smaller, lighter and cheaper part is obvious. It means more technology in the hands of more kids, more money left over to train teachers in using technology effectively, less damage done if something gets damaged.

The part about there being no hard drive, the need for a server and remaining school property addresses concerns that, though likely exaggerated, are real. No hard drive means no stored programs – such as games – which means the kids won’t be killing space aliens when they should be researching the solar system.

Connecting to the Net through the school server means the content can be restricted to the enormous, even mind-boggling, amount of worthwhile information available online, but not to porn or hate sites. By keeping the machines school property, they become the Digital Age equivalent of the textbook, eliminating the objection that the laptop proposal was a feel-good giveaway.

At just a couple hundred dollars, a good quality thin client – essentially a keyboard and a monitor – won’t cost any more than a backpack full of books. This suggestion has already been incorrectly labeled a “low-tech” proposal, but the worlds of business, academics and research are increasingly using thin client or server-centric technology. Maine students can only benefit from gaining experience in what will be computing’s future.

Gov. King spent the first half of this year fending off attacks by Luddites who didn’t have computers when they were kids and couldn’t see why today’s kids should be any different. He’s likely to spend at least some of the second half battling high-tech purists who will object to anything that isn’t the most powerful machine going and that doesn’t offer unfettered, unrestricted access to everything on the Web, even the worst of it. Bet on the governor. He’s pretty good at this sort of thing.