$100 Laptop - Bringing computers to the developing world

A project called One Laptop per Child aims to make computers affordable for the developing world. The computers are expected to sell for only US$100 each. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand have already signed up to buy the machines, and more countries are expected to place orders soon. Test machines are expected to reach children by February, with wider distribution by July.

The laptop in question, the XO machine, was developed by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT. It is powered by a 366MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices. It has built-in wireless networking capability. With no hard disk, the XO uses 512 MB of flash memory and has two USB ports to which additional storage devices may be attached. XO runs on a specially developed version of Linux which is intended to be more user friendly. The user interface, called Sugar, apparently looks and feels unique—different from Linux, Windows or Apple. The machine comes equipped with a word processor, web browser and RSS reader.

The project is intended not only to make computers affordable for children and schools the world over, but to encourage the children to explore the technology and learn computing fundamentals.