One of the most interesting and potentially most globally rewarding initiatives underway is the Hundred Dollar Laptop project, spearheaded by One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founded by Nicholas Negroponte director of the MIT Media Lab. OLPC directors include such IT luminaries as Seymour Papert, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Alan Kay. For $100 each, based on pre-selling six million laptops to governments and non-profits they will by early 2007, produce a laptop, ready for delivery
In the words of the Hundred Dollar Laptop web site,
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3X the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.
More to the point, Negroponte writes, “Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to "learn learning" through independent interaction and exploration”
While Quanta computers in Taiwan has been engaged to produce these machines as soon as a sufficient quantity of initial orders has been received, there remains some work to be done. Of special interest to the readers of this blog, is the need to develop a low cost way of attaching these laptops, which form their own mesh network locally, to the backbone Internet.
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