$100 Laptops For The Developing World
September 29th, 2005
Engineers at MIT are to unveil a $100 dollar laptop that they hope will stimulate education in the developing world. The 500Mhz kit boasts a number of unusual features aimed at making it tough, practical and usable in areas with a poor power infrastructure.
The laptop is blessed with a bare minimum Linux OS. It has a screen that can, with the press of a button, convert from colour to high-contrast back and white, making it viewable in strong sunlight. Power is provided via an AC cord that doubles up as a carrying handle, but can equally be provided by a hand crank on a 10 to 1 ratio i.e. one minute of cranking gives 10 minutes of use. There is in-built WiFi connectivity and each laptop can act as a node in a peer to peer network, meaning that a single internet connection can be used by neighbouring laptops. One area where the specification has not been compromised is memory with 1 GB installed - more than the laptop on which this story is being written.
The MIT team will target Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand for the $100 machines, which they hope will becime cheaper as production volumes increase.
TechSmec.com wonders how long it will be before Microsoft gets in on the act and start offering a ‘free’ version of Windows to the project. The thought of millions of new developing world PC owners using Linux must be an unsettling one for Bill Gates.
Entry Filed under: Hardware Tech
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