Closing the Digital Gap: A Laptop for Every Child
It’s been just over a year since Nicholas Negroponte announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the goal of developing a $100 laptop not for the marketplace, but to be distributed to schools globally to provide "children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves."
What does the initiative have to do with satellites or rocket science? Indirectly, everything. Such initiatives excite interest in technology in general– and the opportunities for education and discovery provided to so many children by the $100 laptop will play a critical role in bringing a creative and educated individuals to the next generation’s workplace, regardless of industry.
But for today, we’ve filed this under "cool stuff," because the technology itself is cool:
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 3× 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)
A wind-up option would be great on my own PC, which always seems to die on long flights just when I’ve decided to turn away from Minesweeper and try to get some work done.
We’ll be tracking the latest news on the $100 Laptop project as news becomes available, because the potential is huge for the technology to "trickle up" to consumer laptops and for the project itself to unlock creativity in millions of children around the world.
(Be sure to check out additional design concepts here.)
