Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations. Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries–Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa–to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children. Link.
2 thoughts on “The $100 laptop moves closer to reality…”
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If they can sell this below $150 in the US, I might just buy this for wifi browsing at coffeshops and whereever. Hopefully, they’ll keep it open enough so that you can install linux or other alternative OSes on it, or at least different software.
Um… from the front page of laptop.media.mit.edu: “The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.”
About the cheapest I’ve seen windows is $50 or so, and that’s got hardware requirements that this system won’t meet. They’re looking at 1gb of space and a 500 mhz processor – plenty for a nicely functioning linux install, if a bit tight on space, but certainly not for windows and associated bloat. It just won’t work for a $100 laptop.
Whether you can install a non-linux OS on it is another question, but it seems likely – drivers might not be comfortable, though.