MIT to develop a USD100 laptop
29-09-2005
by Charlie Taylor

As many as 200 million schoolchildren in the developing world may soon be able to avail of notebooks under a MIT Media Lab initiative.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an organisation established by MIT's chairman and co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, which is seeking to enhance worldwide primary and secondary education through developing a USD100 notebook. It is hoped that the laptops would then be marketed directly to ministries of education who could distribute them like textbooks.

The machines are being designed to do almost everything a regular notebook would do, however the laptops aren't expected to have lots of storage space.

The initiative was first announced at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January. However, this week, Negroponte outlined more details about the cut-price laptop at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The proposed notebook will be a Linux-based machine that can be powered by a crank in places where there is no electricity source. The laptop will also have a 500MHz AMD processor, a 1GB hard drive, and a large number of USB ports. The specially reinforced laptops will also be Wi-Fi and 3G enabled. Once turned on, the notebooks will automatically connect to one another using a mesh network in which every machine acts as a relay point, sending data to each other.

Negroponte claims the organisation can save on costs by using a novel, dual-mode LCD display commonly found in inexpensive DVD players. In addition, he believes that costs can be reduced further by marketing the laptops in large numbers and by removing the amount of software that comes pre-installed on machines.

"We will get the fat out of the systems," said Negroponte. "Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third which does the same functions nine different ways."

Although Negroponte concedes that recycled desktop PCs would be cheaper to manufacture than notebooks he stated that it was important that children would be able to take their machines home with them.

MIT is set to work with a number of companies to develop a fully working and manufactured laptop in less than 12 months, with an eye on building about 100 million to 200 million units by the following year. Among the organisations who have committed to the project are AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat.