A thing of beauty
Posted : November 17, 2005 at 10:52 am [America/Los_Angeles]
[via DailyWireless.org: $100 Laptop Shown]
The $100 laptop is becoming reality. The Researchers unveiled a prototype of the $100 laptop featuring a hand-cranked generator and wireless connections on Wednesday, reports the Seattle Times. They hope to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.
The goal is to provide laptops free of charge to children in poor countries who cannot afford computers, said MIT Media Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte.
The lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply, MIT researchers said at a United Nations technology summit.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other groups have been pushing hard to create a low-cost laptop, part of a U.N. effort’s aim that “everyone, everywhere should have the opportunity to participate” in the benefits of information technology.
Governments or charitable donors will pay for the laptops but children will own them, he said. “Ownership of the laptops is absolutely critical,”
The display screen has been a challenge. In regular laptops, that alone can be worth much more than $100. For this laptop, the display needed to be much cheaper to produce around $35 and it needed to do more, including switch to read vertically like the page of a book.
The proposed design of the machines calls for a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and an innovative dual-mode display that can be used in full-color mode, or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode. The display makes the laptop “both an electronic book and a laptop,” he said.
Negroponte is in discussions with five countries–Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa–to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children.
Five corporate sponsors, including Google and Advanced Micro Devices, have chipped in $2 million apiece to form a nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), to oversee the project.
Hats off to Nicholas Negroponte and folks at MIT working on this initiative. You guys totally rock! Btw, if you have not read Negroponte’s book “Being Digital”, you may want to get a copy of it from your nearest bookstore/library. It’s quite an interesting read.
- Anand
Category: Internet Adoption across the Globe |
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