December 10, 2005
MIT's $100 Notebook Computer to Launch Early 2006
Imagine getting late night phone calls from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all expressing great interest in your latest technology project? That is exactly what happened to Nick Negroponte—legendary founder of MIT's Media Lab. His latest ambitious project is to put hundreds of millions of $100 self-powered laptops into the hands of poor students throughout the developing world.
The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created. The initiative was first announced by Nicholas Negroponte, Lab chairman and co-founder, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.
As Negroponte puts it, "One laptop per child: Children are your most precious resource, and they can do a lot of self-learning and peer-to-peer teaching. Bingo. End of story."
The tiny laptop will be a stripped-down PC, usable for basic word-processing, Internet, and e-mail. It has no hard drive, instead it uses flash memory. The processor, from AMD, runs at 500 megahertz. Though spartan, the design is also ingenious: Each laptop will include a Wi-Fi radio transmitter designed to knit machines into a wireless "mesh" so they can share a Net connection, passing it from one computer to the next. Though the laptop has a power cord, that cool little crank can also provide roughly ten minutes of juice for each minute of turning. The operating system is linux and the software is open source/public domain programs.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has contributed $2 million for the project: Google has also chipped in $2 million. OLPC has raised a total of $10 million, with more on the way.
So far, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva has agreed to buy a million, and Chile, Argentina, and Thailand are lining up. There's even interest domestically. Governor Mitt Romney wants half a million for the kids of Massachusetts.
More info from the MIT website
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Posted by rsk at December 10, 2005 01:39 PM